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Judicial Gobbledygook: The Readability of Supreme Court Writing
Ryan Whalen, Yale Law Journal Forum, 2015
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- A law essay that measures the readability of more than six thousand U.S. Supreme Court opinions with the SMOG index, which counts sentence length and long multisyllabic words. It finds that the Court's writing has become harder to read over recent decades.
- How much weight it carries
- A careful academic essay with a stated method and a dataset built from opinions on CourtListener. It measures only sentence and word length, not clarity or reasoning, and it covers U.S. Supreme Court opinions, not Indian judgments.
Facts taken from this source
- Whalen's readability study covers 6,206 U.S. Supreme Court opinions, taken from the CourtListener archive.
“This results in a dataset containing the full text of 6,206 Supreme Court opinions.” (Part I, Method)
- Whalen finds that legal writing at the U.S. Supreme Court has become more complex and harder to read in recent decades.
“The data shows that legal writing at the Court has become more complex and difficult to read in recent decades.” (Introduction)
- The SMOG index that Whalen uses measures the length of sentences and the number of long, multisyllabic words.
“Like many readability indices, SMOG looks to the length of sentences and the number of long multisyllabic words in each.” (Part I, Method)