Dry Law?

 Flying Sparks

One of the more attractive aspects of government in the US is the constitutional separation of powers.  Of these powers, the Supreme Court is (at present anyway) the more interesting.  Whilst nominations to the Court have become far more politicised in recent decades than they once were, the decisions and reasoning of the justices avoid the almost universal ad hominem irrelevance found in other branches of government, focusing upon the "real" issues of the Republic. 

The New York Times has published a piece reviewing some research done on the current Bench members' legal writing styles.

The justices turn out to be a surprisingly literary bunch. Justice Kennedy, the court’s swing justice, had barely started talking when he began quoting from Hamlet, and he went on to discuss Dickens, Trollope, Faulkner and Solzhenitsyn.
Justice Ginsburg said she had learned much from a course Nabokov taught at Cornell on European literature.
“He was a man in love with the sound of words,” she said of her former professor. “He changed the way I read, the way I write.”

One test is whether the written opinions of  the justices were accessible to the legendary common man.  Here's Justice Thomas:

In the interview, Justice Thomas provided evidence that his writing is easy to grasp, including a remembered airport encounter with a man he assumed to be a law enforcement official.
“He looked like a deputy sheriff,” Justice Thomas said. “He had a little midriff going.”
“Here’s a guy,” the justice went on, “who looked like he clearly didn’t go to college, who said that ‘I’ve read all your opinions.’ Well, that’s accessibility.”

It bodes well for the health of a democracy when apparently ordinary people can read judicial opinions so avidly and the opinions of the Court are sufficiently non-technical that they can be understood. 

Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Scalia are said to be the strongest writers of the nine justices.  When the two end up on opposite sides of an argument, it can be entertaining:

“Justice Scalia is always interesting and fun to read,” said John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University. “He’s pugnacious, combative and smart. Chief Justice Roberts is eloquent and stylish, and he can turn a good phrase.”. . .
When Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia end up on opposite sides of a decision, which is not often, sparks can fly.
Writing for the majority last month, Justice Scalia said state agencies could sometimes sue states in federal court in part because private parties can.
Chief Justice Roberts said the two kinds of suits were not comparable. “It is the difference between eating and cannibalism; between murder and patricide,” the chief justice wrote. “While the ultimate results may be the same — a full stomach and a dead body — it is the means of getting there that attracts notice. I would think it more an affront to someone’s dignity to be sued by a brother than to be sued by a stranger.”
Justice Scalia returned fire in a footnote.
“We think the dissent’s principle of familial affront less than universally applicable, even with respect to real families, never mind governmental siblings,” he wrote, adding, “Confining one’s child to his room is called grounding, while confining a stranger’s child is called kidnapping.”

With such a colourful style getting to the nub of issues, coupled with robust debate, it is no wonder that the opinions of the Court are widely read.  We, in New Zealand, can only be envious.