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96 Cornell L. Rev. 1307 (2010-2011)
Judicial Ghostwriting: Authorship on the Supreme Court

handle is hein.journals/clqv96 and id is 1321 raw text is: JUDICIAL GHOSTWRITING: AUTHORSHIP ON THE SUPREME COURT Jeffrey S. Rosenthal & Albert H. Yoont Supreme Court justices, unlike the President or members of Congress, perfom their work with relatively little staffing. Each justice processes the docket, hears cases, and writes opinions with the assistance of only their law clerks. The relationship between justices and their clerks is of intense interest to legal scholars and the public, but it remains largely unknown. This Arti- cle analyzes the text of the Justices' opinions to better understand judicial authorship. Based on the use of common function words, we find that Jus- tices vary in writing style, from which it is possible to accurately distinguish one from another. Their writing styles also inform how clerks influence the opinion-writing process. Current Justices, with few exceptions, exhibit signif- icantly higher variability in their writing than their predecessors, both within and across years. These results strongly suggest that Justices are increasingly relying on their clerks to write opinions. INTRODUCTION ................................................. 1307 I. METHODOLOGY........................................... 1313 II. D ATA ................................................... 13 17 III. RESULTS ................................................ 1318 A. Variability Scores ............................ 1318 B. Tests of Significance ......................... 1327 C. Authorship Identification .................... 1332 IV. DIscussioN .................................... 1337 CONCLUSION ................................................... 1341 APPENDIX ...................................................... 1342 INTRODUCTION The reason the public thinks so much of the Justices of the Supreme Court is that they are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work. -Justice Louis D. Brandeis' t Professor, University of Toronto, Department of Statistics, and Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, respectively. We would like to thank Ed Cheng, John Goldberg, Pamela Karlan, Helen Levy, David Madigan, Todd Peppers, Richard Posner, Michael Tre- bilcock, Fred Tung, Artemus Ward, and Robert Weisberg. Professor Yoon would also like to thank the Russell Sage Foundation for its general financial support of this research. All remaining errors are our own. I CHARLEs E. WYZANSKI, JR., WHEREAs-AJUDGE'S PREMISES: ESSAYS INJUDGMENT, ETH- ICS, AND THE LAw 61 (Greenwood Press 1976) (1965) (internal quotation marks omitted). 1307

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