Message Undeliverable: An Empirical Assessment of the (Un)Readability of Canadian Court Decisions

Abstract

This article reports on two original empirical studies of the quantitative readability of Canadian court decisions, across court levels and across legal subject areas. Judges often say that members of the general public are part of the audience for their decisions. With these types of assertations in mind, the two studies within this article measure the extent to which court decisions are likely understandable to the people of Canada. Specifically, the article applies a new law-specific readability formula to 1092 recently published court decisions (containing approximately 6.5 million words of text) to assess how likely Canadian decisions are to be understood by readers of different education levels. The results of these studies demonstrate that many, and sometimes most, members of the Canadian population do not have the ability to easily understand the language that judges use within their decisions. By calling attention to the dissonance that exists between judicial desires to communicate directly with members of the public, and the language within court decisions that is likely not understandable to large segments of the population, this article strives to motivate judges to think differently about how they might write decisions in order to achieve their objectives.

Keywords: legal writing, readability, court decisions, access to justice, applied linguistics, judicial writing