Fact · Dictation for work and study
Whalen finds that legal writing at the U.S. Supreme Court has become more complex and harder to read in recent decades.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“The data shows that legal writing at the Court has become more complex and difficult to read in recent decades.”
Judicial Gobbledygook: The Readability of Supreme Court Writing, Ryan Whalen, Yale Law Journal Forum, 2015, Introduction.
Open the original- What it measures
- The finding is about the trend over time, measured by a readability index across the whole sample.
- What it does not show
- Readability indices measure sentence and word length. They do not measure whether a passage is clear to a listener.