The U.S. Supreme Court’s writing style has become more conversational recently, but does it matter?
Jill Barton, professor and director of legal writing at the University of Miami School of Law, explores the changes.
Jill Barton is the author of three books on legal writing. Her latest, The Supreme Guide to Writing (Oxford University Press 2024), analyzed 10,000 pages of U.S. Supreme Court opinions to pinpoint grammar and writing style rules. She also has coauthored The Handbook for the New Legal Writer (Aspen 2023), a popular law school textbook now in its third edition, that aims to demystify the process of legal writing and inspire beginning and experienced legal writers.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s casual writing style
Lawyers have earned a reputation as bad writers. And that’s for good reason. If you sign up for a new app, the terms and conditions are full of legal jargon that’s nearly impossible to understand. But that’s not how the U.S. Supreme Court justices write. My study found that the Court has adopted a more casual and approachable writing style in the last decade.
Surprisingly, the justices have not only distanced themselves from traditional writing conventions; they’ve also let go of some longstanding grammar rules. They dangle modifiers, split infinitives, use double negatives, and throw commas around in a way that would make many grammarians uneasy.
Consider the use of contractions like the words don’t or shouldn’t. In 2012, Justice Antonin Scalia called these two-word combos “intellectually abominable.” But just five years later, his successor, Neil Gorsuch used a contraction in the first paragraph of his first opinion and then on every single page—something no justice had done before. And now, nearly all use contractions on occasion to lighten their style.
The justices also reference pop-culture. They write punchy sentence fragments. They are sarcastic and witty. For example, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote with irony in an affirmative action case that the majority was as oblivious as Marie Antoinette when she said, “let them eat cake.”
Today’s Court also regularly uses the pronoun “you” to speak directly to readers–which would rarely appear in opinions a decade ago. But last year, the Court used “you” and its variations nearly 300 times.
By writing more conversationally, the justices are making their opinions more accessible to a modern audience. They’re abandoning the formal, traditional writing that lawyers are so often bemoaned for. And yes, they’re also ending sentences with prepositions like that one.
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