Washington — Judges' Casual Slang in Opinions Draws Pushback

Opinion — Quote Conservative Commentary Desk

Judges are writing more like people talk, and that shift is drawing criticism from within the legal profession itself, according to a column by David Lat tracking the rise of casual language and slang in judicial opinions. The column, published on Lat's Substack, frames the trend as real and growing — and as contested, not celebrated, across the bar.

What Is David Lat's Column Documenting?

Lat's piece examines a pattern he sees building in courtrooms: judges reaching for slang and informal phrasing in documents that traditionally read like formal legal prose. The column does not treat this as a one-off stylistic flourish from a single eccentric judge. It frames it as a broader movement in how opinions get written, and it says the movement has a fan club and a set of skeptics inside the profession. That framing matters, because judicial opinions are not just rulings for the parties in front of the court. They are precedent, they are teaching tools for law students, and they are the public record of how a judge reasoned through a dispute.

Why Are Judges Loosening Their Prose?

The honest answer is that Lat's column, as summarized, does not spell out a single motive, and this desk will not invent one. What can be said is that judicial opinions increasingly get read outside the courtroom — by reporters, by social media users, by law students hunting for a memorable line to cite in a brief. A opinion written in plain, punchy language travels further than one written in the passive-voice, Latin-heavy style that law schools spent a century drilling into new lawyers. Whether that traveling is a feature or a bug is exactly the fight Lat's column is describing.

What Do Critics Say?

Lat's column notes that the casual approach has drawn criticism from some quarters of the legal community, without naming every critic or cataloguing every complaint. That is enough to establish the basic shape of the argument against slang on the bench: opinions are supposed to be authoritative documents, not blog posts, and a judge who writes like a commentator risks looking like one — undercutting the gravity that makes a ruling stick. Formal language is not decoration. It is a signal that the person writing it is speaking as an institution, not as an individual with opinions of their own.

Does Tone on the Bench Affect Legitimacy?

This is where the argument gets sharper, and where this desk will take a side: judicial legitimacy rests on the appearance, as much as the substance, of neutral, careful reasoning. Courts in the American system operate across overlapping federal and state sovereigns, each with its own norms for how rulings get written and reviewed, a structure explained in Quote Conservative's federalism primer. A judge who trades that inherited formality for internet-ready one-liners is making a bet that readability outweighs gravitas. That bet might pay off with the public. It is a harder sell with the appellate judges who have to cite the opinion later, and with litigants who lost and are looking for any sign the court did not take their case seriously.

The stakes around judicial conduct are not abstract. Courts elsewhere are already litigating what standards apply to judges' professional behavior, as seen in the ongoing matter before the Wisconsin Supreme Court over whether to suspend Judge Hannah Dugan's law license. That case is not about writing style, but it is a reminder that the bench answers to conduct rules the public rarely scrutinizes until something goes wrong. Slang in an opinion is a smaller offense than what that case involves, but it sits on the same spectrum: how much informality can a robe absorb before the robe stops meaning anything.

What Should Readers Watch For?

• Whether appellate courts start citing or distinguishing opinions based partly on tone, not just holding.
• Whether bar associations or judicial conduct commissions issue guidance on informal language in rulings.
• Whether law schools adjust legal-writing curricula to address the split Lat describes.
• Whether more judges follow the trend publicly, or whether the criticism Lat documents pushes the practice back underground.

None of that is settled. Lat's column captures a moment, not a verdict, and the legal profession's answer to it will say a good deal about what courts think they owe the public: clarity, or ceremony.