An analysis of Supreme Court decisions dating back to the court's earliest cases in the 1700s found that with time SCOTUS has become increasingly accessible — but also increasingly long-winded and grouchy. While decisions are easier to read than they used to be, they've ballooned in length — think 4,000 words for Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and more than 10 times that for Citizens United (2010) — and use an increasingly unfriendly vocabulary.
And when we look at the language choices of specific justices, the current court lineup is historically unpleasant (at least on paper): Sitting Justices Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Antonin Scalia all rank in the top ten unfriendliest decision writers in SCOTUS history. Their colleagues were either more temperate (Roberts and Ginsburg) or too new to the court to be included in the study (Kagan and Sotomayor).
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