Jason Reinecke Offers Text Analysis of Judicial Writing Style

Jason Reinecke and Jason Rantanen, University of Iowa College of Law, recently published "The Law as Language: A Computational Text Analysis of Judicial Writing Style." The authors provide a holistic computational overview of judicial opinion writing style and the first computational text analysis of the opinions of the judges of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. "This work is unabashedly descriptive: while there are many interesting questions that computational text analysis can be used to explore, there is little existing work that provides a foundation," they write. "This work aims to fill that gap and set the stage for future projects." Among other findings, the authors find "strong evidence that Federal Circuit judges' writing styles vary considerably among numerous dimensions and that some judges are thus more successful than others at writing clear, concise and complete opinions. Perhaps most importantly, we find that the judges vary considerably in how long their opinions are and in how frequently they cite to both precedent and the record." The paper is forthcoming in the Federal Circuit Bar Journal.