Aesthetic Preferences and Policy Preferences as Determinants of US Supreme Court Writing Style

Abstract Recent literature on writing style in US Supreme Court opinions has focused as a means of furthering justices’ policy goals. In particular, an opinion’s clarity is proposed to make the implementation announced more likely. We give formal argument that observed distribution opinion not easily reconcilable with justices who are striving write clearly service implementation-related goals; this true even if there case-level costs sometimes difficult. propose having aesthetic preferences – essentially, stylistic over language unrelated they weight heavily could explain clarity. Our analysis some 4,500 majority 1955–2008 largely consistent our theoretical argument.