One of the papers Adam Liptak discussed in yesterday’s NYT times article I blogged about is a working paper by Ryan Owens and Justin Wedeking that measures the clarity of Supreme Court opinions using linguistic software. The paper produces estimates of the clarity of the writing of individual judges (see the graph above). Higher scores indicate more complex writing, so justice Ginsburg is by far the most complex writer whereas Breyer and Scalia are the clearest. The paper has a range of other interesting findings, such as that judges are always clearer in dissents than they are in majority opinions and that minimum winning coalitions produce significantly clearer language than unanimous or broad coalitions. This suggests that compromise increases the complexity of legal opinions.
Aside from the substantive findings, the use of linguistic software as a measurement device is interesting and appears to be growing in popularity. The Liptak article also mentions research that uses such to detect ghostwriting in Supreme court decisions and the extent to which opinions use language from briefs. There is a similar trend in legislative studies. I suspect we are going to see more of this. Any suggestions of innovative working papers are welcome (especially from outside the U.S. context).