Judging Readability: A Study of Opinions Written by Apex Court Judges from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States

(2023) 20 Scribes Journal of Legal Writing [forthcoming]

27 Pages Posted: 20 Jul 2022 Last revised: 20 Jun 2023

See all articles by Mike Madden

Mike Madden

University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law

Date Written: July 12, 2022

Abstract

Little is known about the extent to which readability differences exist between opinions written by different apex court judges, or about the potential biographical and contextual factors that may be associated with higher or lower opinion readability levels. This article presents the results of an empirical readability study that measures the quantitative readability levels – using a contemporary formula that leverages advancements in Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics – of every apex court opinion released during 2021-2022 from 5 English-speaking countries. The results offer a full picture of how readably each of the 63 judges within the study write their opinions.

Additionally, the study assesses relationships between both judge-specific biographical variables and opinion-specific contextual variables, on the one hand, and readability scores, on the other hand, in order to ascertain whether readability differences can be explained by any of these variables. Ultimately, this study finds that some variables, such as the judge’s gender and years of post-secondary education, are not meaningfully associated with opinion readability levels. Other variables, such as a judge’s age, experience as a law professor, and time on the bench, are all positively associated with higher opinion readability scores.

The results of this study shed light on some potential drawbacks that could result from efforts to increase opinion readability levels, and suggest starting points for a discussion about how to bring about increased readability levels.

Keywords: readability, judicial opinions, Flesch-Kincaid, CAREC, retirement age, accessibility, access to justice, legal writing

Suggested Citation

Madden, Mike, Judging Readability: A Study of Opinions Written by Apex Court Judges from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States (July 12, 2022). (2023) 20 Scribes Journal of Legal Writing [forthcoming], Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4160956 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4160956

Mike Madden (Contact Author)

University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law ( email )

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