“Judges as Persuasive Storytellers,” With U.S. Judge Stephanos Bibas

RICHARD RE: All right. I think we can get started here. I'm just going to briefly introduce our wonderful learned speaker, Judge Bibas of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The Judge has had an amazing legal career and I'm sure you're all familiar with it. I'll say a couple of quick points.

The Judge proves that those who can do can also teach because he argued six cases in front of the US Supreme Court on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania Law School Clinic where he also taught criminal procedure and a number of other related topics. He's an enormously influential scholar in that field, and his work actually has influenced my own thinking about a number of topics that I do research on myself.

We have in common also going back earlier to his career arc that we worked for the same boss at one time, namely Justice Kennedy. And I think Justice Kennedy's voice echoes in my mind sometimes when I think about the topic that the Judge is going to address today, which is judicial writing, judicial rhetoric, and the crafting of narrative and opinions.

I also just say ever so briefly that the Judge's influence as a jurist in recent years has been phenomenal. There are many people, many observers, many judges many practitioners who look to the Judge's writing, look to the strength of his reasoning, look to the clarity of his expression. And I think he's really a lodestar now for legal culture in a very broad and deep sense in our legal system. So it's with special delight, pride, joy, and gratitude that I want to welcome Judge Bibas to the podium. Thank you.

STEPHANOS BIBAS: Thank you, Richard, for that generous introduction. Thank you to UVA for hosting me and the participants in this wonderful conference that Richard and Walt have organized. So my talk today is judges as persuasive storytellers. And I want you to think back to the 1L legal curriculum.

Judicial opinions needn't be boring. Go back to Benjamin Cardozo's classic in Palsgraf versus Long Island Railroad. Even though it's been 30 years since I had that in 1L, it's still stuck in my brain. It's gripping.

He immediately draws the reader in, laying out what happened on that train platform in crisp sentences. His narrative arc is tight, dramatic, and culminates in the unexpected, having those fireworks knock over the scales at the other end of the platform and go and hit Palsgraf.

He does all that in a single paragraph. And then in the next paragraph, he explains why no one was negligent towards Palsgraf. A couple more paragraphs go and then refute the arguments that Palsgraf was making and uses vivid hypos to show where her theories would lead. Then there's a fifth one that explains how negligence more generally has to be torts in relation to a particular person.

And the sixth and final paragraph notes the court doesn't need to get the proximate causation. The whole thing is 2,400 words long. None of the language is flashy. The case is a century old, but we still assign it to first-year law students to this day. It teaches, it persuades by telling stories.

Then go read an opinion from a continental European tribunal. I used to read a bunch of cases from the European Court of Justice. If you go to the European Court of Human Rights, there's a single opinion for the court. No concurrence or dissent. No judge signs it as author. It has this impersonal bureaucratic face and the language matches it.

The paragraphs are numbered. Few, if any, segues and link them. And all too often the writing is it's turgid, it's disjointed, it reads as if it were written by a committee. We got all the raw ingredients for a story but there's no baker who took the time to knead and bake those ingredients into a coherent loaf.

And now come to today in America, but look at a typical patent case. I've been doing just a little bit of this lately. It is signed by an author that might be separate opinions, but the rest of the same is true as of the European ones.

There's no theme. There's no storyline. The paragraphs are numbered staccatos. The prose is very technical, understandable only by those initiated into this priestly Kant. The block quotations are these bricks of text in the way, the footnotes are the stumbling blocks, and on and on and on. And the reader wonders, what's the point here?

Now it doesn't have to be that way. Almost everything we litigators and judges do involves telling a story. We don't teach that as much as we should, but I try to make that point to my students. It may be the story of a crime. It may be the story of a contract dispute. It may even be the story of ERISA.

To tell that story well we've got to relearn how to hold the reader's attention. How to draw them in, we must recover Cardozo's craft. So just now I wrote my first patent opinion on the merits. And the case involves a pill, a delayed-release anti-inflammatory that treats acne. So I tried to do it as a story.

First, I tell the story of the pill. The pill travels through the digestive system. It gradually breaks down in the body, and why that gradual breakdown, the enteric coating and delayed release matters for the disease it treats-- rosacea. Then I tell how another drug maker came up with a slightly different formulation, just kind of engineering around the patent, and that the inventor sued.

We got the plaintiff's expert narrating how the pill works in the gut. We have the defendant's expert countering with a different understanding of what's going on in the gut and then explain why I don't think the plaintiff's expert is credible and how the plaintiff's theory is strained. To do all that I had to weave the facts together into a story to hit all the points of the governing legal test while flagging holes, flagging inconsistencies in the evidence.

I used headings to telegraph where each part and section was going what I was ruling. I did it all in 20 pages. No footnotes. Move that abstruse language of the actual patent claims themselves into a single one-page appendix, the final product, the patent opinion that I hope an average reader can understand and stay awake reading.

Now, people in general rhetoric has a bad name. People think rhetoric is a flowery frill, it's icing. You layer on top of the cake to sweeten the dessert, but rhetoric is the art of persuasion. And it shouldn't be a sugary afterthought. We should be building it in.

Fundamentally, rhetoric is how we reach the reader or the listener that makes us attend to our audience. Our biggest shortcoming as legal writers is we neglect our audience or we don't do the work we need to do to reach it. So I'm going to start by arguing who I think our audience is or should be. We judges may write for the lawyers in the case, other judges, or other lawyers who practice in that subject area.

[CLEARS THROAT]

We may also think about the losing litigant. But even though we're public servants we seldom attend to who's that public, whom we're serving. In our democracy, I'm going to argue our most basic audience is we the people of the United States. Our authority derives from them. To them, we have to be accountable.

So, once we figure out our audience how do we reach them? I'm going to go on to talk after that about how our audiences will learn best if we tell them lucid, coherent, persuasive stories. Some judges famously did that. Think of the chestnuts from Holmes or Cardozo that we've read in contracts, we read in torts or read in con law.

But we've developed bad habits and many of those habits stand in the way. So we have to relearn the writerly craft of narrative. That means the protagonist's point of view, plot, theme, resolution, and so on. We need to think at the macro level, what's our theme and point, the mid-level of our sections and paragraphs, the micro level of our sentence structures and word choices. And to do that, we ourselves should be reading widely in fiction, in nonfiction as well as the law.

Of course, not all writerly skills and techniques work well in opinions. I love William Faulkner, but the idea of the sentences that roll on and on like the Mississippi and the digressions and the tangents, that doesn't work here. I love a good mystery story, but you don't save the reveal until the last chapter where Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple finally identifies them. That doesn't work for what we're trying to do here, but still, other genres have a lot to teach us, so do great judges who've come before us, so do the great brief and opinion writers of today.

So I want to make an introductory note. And I think it's an interesting symposium we have. I understand as a recovering academic, I like to say, that some of those in the symposium are criticizing judges' moves from the outside, sometimes even accusing us of sleight of hand. That external perspective is legitimate. Maybe sometimes it's uncharitable, but I'm not taking issue with that.

My experience as a judge, though, is that we judges rarely, if ever, cloak or dissemble. Our rhetorical shortcomings are mostly unintentional. I can hear the academics saying maybe he's cloaking or dissembling by saying they don't cloak and dissembling.

[LAUGHTER]

Of course, I can't prove that. But even if you doubt that claim, take this essay on its own terms from within the internal perspective, as long as a judge aspires to write well and democratically, I argue. Here are some of the things we should attend to and some of the things we should avoid. Number one, addressing the people.

Schools, unfortunately, no longer teach rhetoric. It used to be a staple of the trivium classical education. And it shows few speakers and few writers start by asking whom am I addressing. It's not enough for us judges to figure out our own answers. We write opinions to people, but to whom?

Now most obviously we write to the lawyers in the case as if we were grading the briefs, marking each argument right or wrong. But writing just that way seems like inside baseball. It might suggest we just have to knock down all the obstacles that stand in the way of getting to the result. Responding to arguments is necessary, but it's not enough.

We judges we also write for the litigants. Each party deserves his day in court, his opportunity to be heard. So we have to make sure the losing party knows we understand his case, we understand his arguments on their own terms, and charitably I hope, before explaining why that person loses.

We judges also write for other judges and lawyers, too. We make law interstitially in the course of applying and harmonizing existing law. So I'm an appellate judge. I ought to explain to the district judges in my circuit what's the rule I'm announcing. How are you supposed to apply it? What do you need to do to follow it next time? I hope that lawyers and scholars and law students can grasp how to make sense of this particular corner of law.

By the way, I consider it pretty high praise that some district judges in my courthouse say, thank you, now I know what to do next time. But the fact that they're so eager about it implies to me that we're not open enough doing that, that it's kind of uncommon, even though that should be an important mission of a judicial opinion.

But these other constituencies obscure what I argue is our most fundamental audience, we the people. We the people of the United States and our democracy under our Constitution are the source of my judicial power. I need to keep reminding myself I'm a servant of the public. There's a reason I have that oath on the back wall of my office and I see it all the time.

I'm not elected. After I'm confirmed there's no democratic check on me. So I need to ground my reasoning in the Constitution and the laws duly enacted by the people. Alexander Hamilton's Federalist 78, "My power comes not from force or will, but judgment." If I do that well, the public's going to understand whom to hold accountable. Congress drafted this law or we need to amend the Constitution or something else.

If I do it poorly I invite suspicion. Maybe I'm sneaking my own will or policy preference ahead of those of the people. So in that sense and only in that sense, I mean, the way I do my job ought to be fundamentally democratic. I do not mean to say that I should be taking popular opinion polls.

I don't mean to say I shouldn't reach unpopular results. Many laws protect rights and minorities. My job is to stand against those political winds and transient passions. But what I do mean is I ought to be explaining why the law not politics or personal preference dictates my reasoning and outcomes as much as humanly possible.

Of course, it's an ideal. We are human beings, but to show that we are striving as much as we humanly can to do that. And in order to do that I have to heed how I use rhetoric and how I tell stories that the people can understand.

So I talked about my audience, let me talk to you now about the benefits of writing clear, persuasive stories. So we judges we're already writing for parties, we're writing for the lawyers, we're writing for other judges. If we add the public to the top of that list, that takes work. It takes a shift in our perspective. But the extra effort I'm arguing is worth it. It helps all the stakeholders understand our work and use it.

So first of all, it helps the public better understand what's the law and what do judges do. The law is often opaque to ordinary Americans. Few of them have lawyers to advise them what to do. When a judicial opinion speaks clearly citizens understand more likely what their legal rights are, what their duties are. So accessible writing gives them better notice, give them due process, and helps us reach our core audience.

Now, I'm not going to overstate my point, of course. Most ordinary people don't read most opinions, but some people read some of them. By the way, it's kind of surprising sometimes how randomly people are looking into some area and come across something that I would have thought would be an obscure opinion. And when the people do but especially on matters of public interest accessibility is crucial.

And when it comes to explaining narrative helps us to explain clearly. It's familiar. Everyone grew up reading and hearing stories. So if we structure our legal opinions and style them as stories that makes them more accessible. It makes the narrative. It organizes our points into a coherent whole. It makes them digestible.

We explain principles, statutes, and precedents in ways that reassure citizens that we're fulfilling our role as public servants. We can show we're not just politicians in robes. We can explain why citizens shouldn't just focus on which results they like. And we constrain politicians' and talking heads' ability to denigrate our handiwork as just politics in disguise.

But it doesn't just help the public, it also helps lawyers. It helps them advise their clients, makes their jobs easier, too. So lawyers don't have to spend as much effort on legal research and puzzling over precedents. Even lawyers who are maybe less able or less bright can still understand and advise well.

It makes the law more determinate, and it teaches good writing habits. And that's an important thing. It counteracts our profession's long-standing problem with bad writing. So Miguel de Cervantes wrote this 400 years ago in the original novel, Don Quixote. But do not give it to a lawyer's clerk to write for they use a legal hand that Satan himself will not understand. That's quite the indictment.

Finally, writing persuasive narratives helps judges to do our jobs better. Now clear storytelling helps us. That sounds paradoxical. After all, it makes us work harder. It's demanding. We have to. But it pushes us to up our game. So if we make our opinions clearer we improve them.

A mentor taught me fuzzy writing conceals fuzzy thinking. Writing clearly forces a judge to figure out which issues matter, what flaws or gaps there are in the reasoning. It makes us put our cards on the table. Readers can see the problems with opinions and criticize them. That transparency forces us to improve our craft.

And here I think I can slip in an aside my complaint about some academics. And some academic discourse is that when you go and read people in certain schools there's a certain obfuscation that comes from a very technical vocabulary and often I think the emperor has few clothes. And if in fact, they were translating it into English, they'd see, oh, I've just dressed this up into polysyllabic nonsense.

But anyway, storytelling by contrast forces us to clarify. We have to figure out our points better. We have to buttress them better. We have to weed out what doesn't advance the storyline of the argument. So the whole, that results is greater than the sum of the parts. And a clear opinion has to show that it rests solidly on accepted sources of law.

It makes it harder for us judges to smuggle in our policy preferences even unconsciously. It makes us easier to distinguish what's a claim of expertise from what's democratically elected law. Clear opinions are easier for other judges to understand and follow. It makes it harder for other judges to misapply what we've written, and it helps others to understand and properly build on the law on the books.

So now the third part of my argument, how do you tell a persuasive legal story? We used to live in an oral storytelling culture where this is natural. I don't think it's second nature to people anymore, but I think people recognize a good story when they hear it.

To do a job well I need to convince and persuade, which are slightly different things, my various audiences by telling them stories. My stories need to be clear and compelling enough so non-lawyers can follow them. Like good novelists, I try to show and not just tell. My tone needs to be neutral and trustworthy.

My opinions have to be solidly grounded in fact in law. I show my work, I use authority to make clear I'm following the law, not being arbitrary or writing my own policy preferences into law. But I'm careful not to clutter my opinions with more authority than needed. There are opinions out there that go rat-a-tat-tat machine gun style with cases as a substitute for reasoning and narrative as opposed to a supplement or support.

Whenever possible there's a protagonist, a theme, and a narrative. And there's just enough foreshadowing and explanation to guide the reader every step of the way. So I don't think it's right that there should be zero redundancy. A little bit of redundancy in my opinion is helpful to just guide the reader along the way.

OK. Let's start by talking about the anatomy of an opinion. Start with the introduction. The first line or first paragraph of my opinions may sum up the theme or point of a case. I'll focus the reader's attention. Then the next few, try to give a very high-level overview of the story and issue, orienting the reader to what follows. I summarize the court's holding, the key takeaway for future cases.

Now, why is that two to four-paragraph introduction important? With the decline of print journalism, few newspapers still have reporters who specialize in covering a court beat. I don't count on a beat reporter to accurately understand a complex opinion and do the work of distilling it for the public.

Rarely do I have David Lat as my audience to be able to explain my opinion to non-lawyers. Most of the time I have to write my opinions and conclusions, interests and conclusions almost as press releases to summarize the key facts, principles, and hold them.

After that comes the facts section. I approach the facts like a sculptor, trying to chip away the most inessential parts of the key facts come through. If it doesn't serve the shape of the sculpture, I'll get rid of it. Readers get lost in a sea of names and exact dates, or worse yet, acronyms. Most cases revolve around a few key-named figures, and usually a rough time frame is enough.

Give the reader the basics, the who, what, when, where, and why. It helps to start the story with the protagonist, and usually move chronologically. Use topic sentences to orient the reader to each chunk of narrative. The facts section should be an overview and then more complete details often fit better later on in analyzing or discussing each issue rather than saying everything wants in the facts and then again regurgitating it in the body.

It's also helpful to use themes. In a criminal case, it's not a bad idea to highlight the strongest evidence of guilt and any weaknesses or gaps. The message is that the conviction is sound or unsound. In a contract case, explain what the parties agreed to and how or why one side failed to live up to its promises. If a party said one thing before yet now changes its tune in litigation, flag the inconsistency, perhaps quoting the party's own words or contractual language.

One of my favorite rhetorical techniques is hoist the side by its own petard. You don't have to say they're being hypocrites, just quote the language that's at odds with what they're arguing now. In the procedural history, elide what doesn't matter. No one cares what number each count bore in the criminal indictment. Mention a jury instruction only if there's a dispute over it in the case.

Name the lawyer only if his conduct is in question, say because he allegedly gave ineffective assistance as a counsel. If the basis for jurisdiction is obvious and uncontested, no need to delve into that. It's usually enough just to state the uncontested standard of review in a sentence or two.

One shrivel of a writing by the way is avoid the passive voice. And it's true the passive voice leadens and deadens prose, but sometimes it helps to keep the spotlight where you want it. In a paragraph that's all about a criminal defendant, it can distract readers to shift the subject to the police who arrested the defendant, the grand jury that indicted him, and the petty jury that convicted him. Maybe better just to write the defendant was arrested, convicted, the charge and convicted by the jury of such and such crimes.

The legal analysis is the meat of the opinion. Where there are multiple issues break them down into separate parts, sections, subsections as needed to create manageable chunks. Usually, put the most important issue up front, the least important at the end.

But sometimes, of course, there's a jurisdictional issue. It needs to come before the merits or damages. It naturally comes after liability. It also normally flows better to first make affirmative arguments and then deal with counterarguments towards the end of each section.

So explanatory headings help, too. Instead of just saying the contract claim, you can summarize the point in short line-- despite Smith's unilateral mistake the contract binds him. Then the reader knows what to watch out for. And umbrella paragraphs after headings underscore that message foreshadowing the points to come. The same by the way goes for smaller units of text.

Almost every paragraph should have a topic sentence that signposts its point, yet many legal writers launch straight into citation at the start of each paragraph. In Brown versus Jones 123F4678 Third Circuit 2025, the Third Circuit, dot, dot, dot, dot. Organized paragraphs not around cases but around principles or points. Push the authorities down into supporting positions later in the paragraph. If you use mid-sentence citations they break up the plot, the ordinary people just indigestible.

I'll tell you Justice Barrett is a master at guiding readers. As a newer justice, he often has to write dry technical opinions, yet she guides her reader through complex subjects with ease. So she had a recent opinion for the court in ZF Automotive versus Luxshare. She explained private arbitration panels don't count as foreign or international tribunals under a discovery statute.

It sounds pretty dull, right? But she kept the readers on track with a helpful introduction, with ample signposting, with short paragraphs, and instructive topic sentences.

Next, let me talk about the craft of writing accessible stories. First, how do you focus and prune an opinion? We judges know it's good to be clear and concise. People can parrot that, but it's harder to do it. So we may not have learned how to do it in practice. As judges, we have more freedom in writing than litigators do. We need to learn how to use that freedom.

I was really amazed when I realized I got a judicial commission on my wall. I don't have to follow the Bluebook religiously anymore where it's doomed or it's going to interrupt the opinion. I can vary from it. I don't have to cover my rear with a footnote for every subsidiary point. It's good to be the King.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean that metaphorically.

[LAUGHTER]

Not literally. Rhetoric includes metaphor. OK. First, in doubt. If in doubt, leave it out. As Judge Prettyman said, "The lawyer's greatest weapon is clarity, and its whetstone is succinctness." It's important to show our work. It's important to cover the bases.

Judges and clerks may spend hundreds of hours crafting opinions. We have to tease apart each legal issue and put it back together again. But the reader needn't see every dead end that precedes the final draft. Cut what you can cut. Some of the best opinions are short and to the point. Justice Kavanaugh is especially good at penning crisp opinions.

So in just four pages in Vaello Madero, he explained why Congress could differentiate between the rates of benefits for Puerto Ricans and those for residents of the continental states. Similarly, he needed just five pages in Thole versus US Bank to resolve a tricky standing issue under ERISA. The rest of us need to read and learn from such exemplary writing.

Also, be judicious about using authority. Many legal rules like standards of review, they're well known. They're not in dispute. Just use a single short citation and move on. Don't vomit all the authority you've found onto a page. Gathering all the authority is just the first step of research. The next steps need to involve organizing, culling, distilling. It takes more work but it's worth it.

Don't treat citations as a substitute for analysis and reasoning. I don't care how many magistrate judge opinions a litigant found from the Northern Mariana Islands if it's not binding authority from the Supreme Court of my Circuit. It matters only if it's persuasive. So explain what makes it persuasive or delete.

We judges can unlearn some of the habits we learned as lawyers. Lawyers are partisans. They need to do more to show their work. That means citing more cases, exploring more tangents. But as a neutral judge I don't need as many citations, especially for uncontested facts. And as the decider, I can shear off the tangents and issue footnotes. I can thus tell a cleaner story.

True, I still need to cover all the parties' arguments. Usually, I start by laying out general principles of law in the area then I make an affirmative case for holding, respond to each of the losing side's objections, and then apply the holding to the facts. It's important to attack not straw men but steel men [CLEARS THROAT] and give the other side its best shot before knocking it down.

The losing party needs to see I've treated it fairly and respectfully without sarcasm or snark. Writing it's tricky when one side fails to make or preserve an argument. If that forfeiture is debatable I might explain why the argument fails in any event. It's also important to bracket issues that are forfeited or not raised by this party but might win in a future case to flag what we have not decided.

I don't want the failings of one party or lawyer to warp the developmental law for others. Also, we need to know how to use our law clerks. These young lawyers fresh out of law school, they're eager to share with us everything they've dug up. They can be like magpies collecting shiny cases from the research proudly bringing them back to show off to their judges.

And when we ask them to write first drafts of opinions they understandably err on the side of including everything we might want to see. We have both the experience and responsibility to sculpt away everything that doesn't need to be in there. One way to do that is tell clerks not to turn their bench memos into drafts. At arguments, parties concede some points, they focus on others, we can then ensure that our opinions leave those issues aside and get to the heart of what's left.

Next, writing simply using plain language. Even the shortest opinion is useless if it's written in latinate legalism. If we're going to speak clearly we have to combine brevity and simplicity. The very best judges eschew rigid prose in favor of engaging the audience, often, not always, in a conversational style.

The average person needn't read John Smith, Smith, or John, Jane Doe, Doe, or Jane come before this honorable court in the above-captioned case. It's enough to write the plaintiffs are John Smith and Jane Doe. Making dense concepts or facts intelligible is hard, but is worth it. Justice Scalia was a master at doing that with vivid stories.

So think about how he described the Establishment Clause doctrine, the Lemon Test that had given generations of judges headaches. Quote, "Like some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children in school attorneys of the Center Moriches Union Free School District. Its most recent burial, only last term, was, to be sure, not fully six feet under."

Now, Justice Scalia's reference to horror movies wasn't a gratuitous pop culture fillip. He had a point to explain why readers should view the Lemon Test as dead despite recent sightings and why the majority opinion should have discarded it once and for all.

Another thing that sets the quip apart from judicial references to say The Bachelor or Hamilton, the musical, Scalia's quip stands the test of time. The reader need not have seen a specific show. Its colorful imagery shows the reader what she needs to know. Similarly, Justice Scalia had a famous solo dissent in Morrison versus Olson, explaining why insulating an independent prosecutor from the president's oversight threatened the constitutional structure.

Quote, "This is what this suit is about. Power. The allocation of power among Congress, the President, the courts in such fashion as to preserve the equilibrium the Constitution sought to establish. Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the court clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing-- the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful perceptive reader. But this wolf comes as a wolf," he said.

Justice Scalia's story was so effective because he avoided legalese and stuffy language and technical expositions. Instead, he used analogy to great effect, comparing knotty legal issues to easy-to-understand concepts. True, few of us have his knack for a well-honed metaphor, but we can at least aim for his somewhat conversational style.

Though there's no one-size-fits-all guide to plain writing, I offer a few suggestions. First, judges should use short one or two-syllable words instead of long latinate, let alone Latin words. Let rather than permit, gone rather than by your arm, car, not vehicle, fair rather than equitable when you don't mean the technical sense of equity, on its own rather than [NON-ENGLISH], and so on.

Next, we judges should strike a balance between overly formal language and noticeably slang or excessive colloquialism. Justice Scalia was very intentional about how he did that. Though he used plain ordinary language he also avoided contractions, seeing them as, quote, "An affront to the dignity of the court."

Now this is a judgment call. I respect greatly some judges who do choose to use it, but I likewise avoid contractions in judicial opinions. I don't avoid them in scholarship like this essay because it's a different audience and a different kind of tone, I think, that's called for. And he, Justice Scalia loathed acronyms as I do. Once complaining about the alphabet soup used to label government agencies.

Finally, I think we judges ought to minimize interrupting our prose with citations and long quotations. They distract the reader. Many of the quotations aren't written very well. Most lay readers aren't used to inline citations, and judges should avoid them mid-sentence and where possible group them towards the end of paragraphs.

As I said, make the principal point and then buttress it with the citations after that. It won't always work, but sometimes. But that doesn't mean footnotes. Footnotes force the reader's eye down and up down and up repeatedly and that interrupts the flow of reading.

Similarly, if you have a long poorly written quotation, that could be excellent authority, but it's distracting, and it's confusing. Block quotations especially often get skipped, they get skimmed. Use them only when the reader needs to see a whole statute, a whole contractual provision, or the like in context. And first, introduce them so the reader knows why they're worth reading and what to look for.

When possible paraphrase instead of quoting or weave several short quoted phrases into your sentences. If you follow these suggestions that might make opinions more accessible and conversational but still dignified. They demystify the judicial process, they help courts, the citizens hold courts accountable, and they build trust in the judicial process and judgments.

Next, edit, edit, edit. Opinions need to strike just the right tone of authority, neutrality, and basis in law, offering just enough detail to make sense to hold the reader's interest and to persuade them. That's easy to say but hard to boil down into rules. The best way to work on these points is to have several people read drafts and offer their own comments.

Of course, it helps to set aside a draft and come back to it with fresh eyes, but the draft may strike other readers differently. And I learned so much from that kind of audience feedback. And if readers lose my thread or the draft presumes knowledge that they don't have, these other readers can work collectively to improve it. That's part of writing for the reader's perspective.

As long as we judges retain our authorial voice and final say we should welcome feedback to keep improving our handiwork. That's how I use my law clerks. I use all my clerks to focus-test my opinions. How do they come off? Does this phrase work or not? And really getting to see it from different people's points of view helps me to get out the parts that are even a little bit opaque.

Next, read good stories. To tell good stories it helps to read good stories. There are some excellent stories in the best opinions and briefs.

So as an advocate and now as a jurist, Chief Justice Roberts is a masterful writer. Take for example the way that one of his briefs introduces when he was an advocate, a zinc mine at the center of an environmental dispute. And by the way, this case is full of lots of technical environmental regulation, but the oasis introduced by this description in the facts.

Quote, "For generations, Inupiat Eskimos hunting and fishing in the DeLong Mountains in Northwest Alaska had been aware of orange and red-stained creekbeds in which fish could not survive. In the 1960s, a bush pilot and part-time prospector by the name of Bob Baker noticed striking discolorations in the hills and creekbeds of a wide valley in the Western DeLong.

Unable to land his plane on the Rocky tundra to investigate, Baker alerted the US Geological Survey. Exploration of the area eventually led to the discovery of a wealth of zinc and lead deposits. Although Baker died before the significance of his observations became known, his faithful traveling companion, an Irish Setter who often flew shotgun, was immortalized by a geologist who dubbed the Creek Baker spotted Red Dog Creek."

So in just a few sentences, now Chief Justice Roberts presents an engaging and complete story. Through it he gets the reader to care about the origins of the Red Dog mine, something that might otherwise be boring or technical. And he suddenly conveys the message that local and state officials have special knowledge about the mine, an idea that matters for his brief's core legal argument. Chief Justice Roberts thus shows us how legal writers can harness the power of a well-told story.

But it's also good to read non-legal writers. Reading Hemingway's essay reminds us how important it is to choose the right forceful verbs to make our points. Dickens portrays characters whom readers care about. Tom Wolfe lets his subjects hoist themselves by their own foibles. Of course, their genres are different, and their goal is not to leave the reader with a crisp rule of law. Still, we can glean lessons from them as we find our own voices.

In sum, from our earliest years we humans learn from stories. We follow their characters and plot. We care if their details are convincing. Stories organize facts into coherent narratives that may make a point. True, legal storytelling uses authority and reasoning differently from fiction, but it too can involve a protagonist, other characters, a plot, and a theme. That's an effective way to explain, persuade, and convince.

I've argued that judges should write for our core audience, we the people. That means speaking through clear, concise opinions that tell intelligible stories. By honing that craft, we can better persuade and convince not only litigants, lawyers, and other judges but also the people that our judgments are fair, impartial, and solidly grounded in law. Thank you.