Supreme Court Opinions Are Growing Longer, Less Clear, and More Boring

A terrific piece of reporting by Adam Liptak in today's New York Times (here) supports an argument that I have long been making (see, e.g., here and here) that Supreme Court opinions are out of control. Here's one interesting tidbit from the article: In the 1950s, the median length of Supreme Court opinions was 2000 words. The Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education - a judicial landmark if ever there was one - was all of 4000 words. Today, by contrast, hardly any Supreme Court opinions manage to come in under 10,000 words; and it is not at all uncommon to find opinions in the 40,000-word range, which approximates a 300-page book.

This might be acceptable if the opinions were well crafted and engaging to read, but they never are. As Liptak points out, Supreme Court opinions are pastiches of draft opinions by clerks, plagiarized sections of briefs from the parties, topped off with a few apercus by the Justices themselves. They are stylistically inconsistent and often border on incoherence, which needless to say undermines their pedagogical and wider social purpose. What we need are opinions that are clear, to the point, and written with a bit of flair. What we tend to get are plodding tomes.