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The year's biggest surprise at the Supreme Court: Elena Kagan's prose
- TomOfTTB 15y agoThis got 10 points? Seriously? Its a puff piece for gods sakes. (Not that it isn't good for Supreme Court justices to write well and express their opinions strongly but that's sort of their job so I don't see the point of 3 pages of praise)
- kenjackson 15y agoI think this author confuses good writing with wit. In opinions clarity is extremely important. The author says, "The Court’s best writers tend to do their most striking work in dissent, unconstrained by the need to pacify their colleagues." Completely untrue. It's just in the dissent when justices tend to focus a lot less on legal clarity and more on emotional prose. With that said, the author is correct that Kagan's prose is quite good. Not for which he front-loads this piece with (like that horrible Scalia quote), but because of what is on the next page -- legal and logical clarity. Although its disappointing to hear no mention of law clerks and writing style. While the amount of actual opinion writing done by law clerks varies from one justice to the next, it's almost certainly the case that they do a good portion of the draft writing for the majority of justices. Not sure of the relevance to HN though.
- mieses 15y agoI don't see any striking legal or logical clarity in these writing samples. What I do see is a thinly veiled attempt to celebrate her ideological positions.