Detecting multiple authorship of United States Supreme Court legal decisions using function words

TL;DR

This study employs statistical analysis of function words in US Supreme Court decisions to identify variability in justices' writing styles and assess how distinguishable their styles are from each other.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze judicial writing styles and quantify stylistic differences among justices using function word analysis.

Findings

Certain justices exhibit highly variable writing styles.

Distinct stylistic signatures can be identified for different justices.

Variability correlates with reliance on law clerks.

Abstract

This paper uses statistical analysis of function words used in legal judgments written by United States Supreme Court justices, to determine which justices have the most variable writing style (which may indicated greater reliance on their law clerks when writing opinions), and also the extent to which different justices' writing styles are distinguishable from each other.