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62 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1421 (1995)
Judges' Writing Styles (And Do They Matter)

handle is hein.journals/uclr62 and id is 1425 raw text is: Judges' Writing Styles (And Do They Matter?) Richard A. Posnert I have been interested in the topic of judges' writing styles since I became a judge in 1981, and have written a fair amount about it.' But rereading what I have written I find that it lacks system and I welcome this opportunity to begin to repair the lack. I shall start by trying to explain the elusive concept of style and to distinguish it from related concepts, notably rhetoric. I shall also try to distinguish good from bad style and then, abstracting from the question of quality, sketch the two funda- mental judicial styles. Borrowing a distinction from Robert Penn Warren, I call these styles the pure and the impure and associate them with two fundamental jurisprudential stances, the formalist and the pragmatist. Formalists tend to prefer the pure style, pragmatists the impure. Last I consider whether judicial style has more than symptomatic significance-that is, whether it has significance independent of the clues (not always reliable, as we shall see) that it provides to the jurisprudence of the writer. I. WHAT IS STYLE? Style, even when confined to writing (as distinct from a tennis player's or a dandy's style-or for that matter Oliver Wendell Holmes's style, if one is thinking of the whole person or persona, rather than just the writing; or even style as a synonym for culture), is one of those words that we are entirely t Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Senior Lecturer in Law, The University of Chicago. I thank Guido Calabresi, William Domnarski, Frank Easterbrook, Ward Farnsworth, Robert Ferguson, William Landes, Lawrence Lessig, Martha Nussbaum, Cass Sunstein, and Erika Vanden Berg for their very helpful com- ments on a previous draft. ' See, in particular, The Federal Courts: Crisis and Reform 107-15, 230-36 (Harvard, 1985); Goodbye to the Bluebook, 53 U Chi L Rev 1343 (1986); Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation 281-99 (Harvard, 1988); Cardozo: A Study in Reputation, 33-57, 125-43 (Chicago, 1990). Interest in the subject is, I think, growing. See, for recent exam- ples, Haig Bosmajian, Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions (Southern Illinois, 1992); Mark Tushnet, Style and the Supreme Court's Educational Role in Government, 11 Const Commentary 215 (1994). 2 The sense in which it is used in Peter Gay, Style in History (Basic Books, 1974), 1421

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