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Friday, November 04, 2011
Courts - The variability of the writing of two judges known to write their own opinions, Richard A. Posner and Frank Easterbrook, was markedly lower and more consistent than any current or recent Justices on the SCOTUS
That is (a paraphrase of) one of the findings of a summary taken from Judicial Ghostwriting: Authorship on the Supreme Court, a 38-page article written by University of Toronto Professors Jeffrey Rosenthal and Albert Yoon published in the Cornell Law Review. The summary appears in this Nov. 4th post by Aaron Tang in SCOTUSblog.
More from the introduction to the Cornell LR article:
Based on the use of common function words, we find that Justices vary in writing style, from which it is possible to accurately distinguish one from another. Their writing styles also inform how clerks influence the opinion-writing process. Current Justices, with few exceptions, exhibit significantly higher variability in their writing than their predecessors, both within and across years. These results strongly suggest that Justices are increasingly relying on their clerks to write opinions.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 4, 2011 12:34 PM
Posted to Courts in general