The current Supreme Court has upended historical precedent on abortion protections and faced scrutiny over ethical conflicts, while its docket remains packed with high-profile cases that will make headlines in the coming months.

Where it differs from its lesser-known past, however, is in its treatment of punctuation.

Justice Neil Gorsuch boldly broke with court tradition in 2017 by issuing his first Supreme Court opinion. In 11 pages, he uses 15 abbreviations. He even used one in the first paragraph: "This is the heart of our argument now," he said nonchalantly.

Gorsuch's predecessor, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was considered a talented playwright. Scalia found abbreviation — combining two words with an apostrophe into a shorter form, such as “don’t” instead of “do not” — “intellectually repugnant.”

Gorsuch's extremely informal phrasing marked a shift by all nine justices toward a more modern, conversational writing style.

While the court's political leanings have shifted to the right, the justices' prose has arguably shifted to the left, becoming more liberal and approachable. According to my study of ten thousand pages of opinions over the past decade, today's Supreme Court is uniformly and aggressively adopting progressive writing styles that defy old-fashioned rules of grammar.

Twitter touts #GorsuchStyle

The first opinion assigned to a new judge is often a difficult process. In a tradition of bullying, they are usually assigned to write on a dull legal issue but easily win unanimous approval.

Gorsuch struck a more colloquial tone with his brief take on the dry topic of debt collection. In Hanson v. Santander, the Harvard Law School graduate spoke directly to readers, using "you" and variations of personal pronouns 17 times, something few of his colleagues did. Gorsuch wrote with apparent disinterest, calling debt collectors "repo men."

Journalists and court observers took notice, and a discussion brewed online about #GorsuchStyle.

Today, most judges use abbreviations. Justice Elena Kagan argued that creativity can be stifled in copyright infringement cases, insisting: "That's the problem. (Yes, it's mostly Shakespeare.)"

Hey, you - I'm talking to you.

While Gorsuch may have sharpened the court's writing revolution, all nine justices are now writing more casually to appeal to an increasingly savvy public. Some justices even casually added exclamation points to their opinions.

In a 2021 dissent to a decision restricting voting rights, Kagan decried that "the majority was outraged that no one was disputing these 'legal points'." "Excellent!" I just hope that most people will take them to heart. "

My research found that during the 2023-24 term, the justices used “you” and its variations to engage readers nearly 300 times in 60 opinions, a 40% increase from five years ago.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in the 2024 impound case, told readers: “A police officer can impound your car if he claims it is connected to a crime committed by someone else. "

"But you don't have to take my word for it," Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson recently quipped during a 2024 criminal bribery verdict.

Given that many good writers—lawyers, academics and journalists among them—avoid using personal pronouns for stylistic reasons, the judges' new direction shows a surprising lack of formality.

The writing style of today's judges stands in stark contrast to their predecessors, who often used dense phrasing and labyrinthine sentences. Take, for example, this 1944 quote from Justice Robert H. Jackson, whom several justices named their most admired author:

"But here is an attempt to criminalize an otherwise innocent act simply because the prisoner is the son of parents who have no choice and who belong to a race from which he cannot exit."

His writing feels lyrical and powerful, but never tongue-in-cheek or personal.

Chief Justice John Roberts, known for his rhetorical skills, has long lamented that the media must summarize and translate the court's lengthy opinions for the public. In 2017, he praised the simplicity of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark desegregation decision.

Roberts said the newspaper was only 10 pages long and "had to publish the whole thing so people could read it. They didn't have a chance to say, 'Oh, this is what it meant.'"

Good, clear writing has power

Even as the court embraced a more accessible writing style, its popularity plummeted. While 80% of Americans had a favorable view of the courts in the mid-1990s, only about 50% now have a favorable view.

The 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was particularly controversial, sparking two years of protests by abortion rights supporters and a national debate over reproductive rights. But even conservative critics decried the court's July 2024 decision to expand presidential immunity in Trump v. United States, calling it an "embarrassment" of "a mess" and "incoherent."

Roberts, who began his career as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, earned a reputation for taking a measured, long-term approach to avoiding controversy and working to bring the justices to consensus. The first few opinions of the 2024-2025 term, including the decision to ban TikTok, were unanimous — as were about 50% of the court's rulings, though those tended to address less contentious issues.

But leaks of draft opinions and memos about the justices' secret deliberations paint a picture of a storied institution in disarray. Scrutiny of the Supreme Court is growing, with critics including former President Joe Biden calling for binding ethics rules and term limits.

For the Roberts Court, the challenge ahead is ensuring its legitimacy among a deeply polarized American public. The justices making their opinions more approachable may be a small move in that direction.

"I think the great thing about the Supreme Court is that the justices are able to really explain their votes," Jackson told NPR on September 4, 2024. "We're the only branch of government that has that as a standard. "

Can making clear, strong arguments in simple, direct language help rebuild trust in institutions? The judges' subtle shift toward modernizing the writing suggests they believed this might happen.