Making judge-speak clear amidst the Babel of lawspeakers.

• Author: Wolff, Michael A.
• Position: The Art, Craft, and Future of Legal Journalism: A Tribute to Anthony Lewis

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. (1)

Rising above (or below) my assigned topic--how journalism covers court decisions and the courts as an institution--I would like to focus on how courts express themselves, because the clarity of their expressions affects the quality of the public discussions they prompt.

I was profoundly influenced by Anthony Lewis' great book, Gideon's Trumpet, which was assigned reading in a college course in Government not long after its publication. I was editor of the daily student newspaper, The Dartmouth, and had a faint interest in law (some of my judicial and professorial colleagues may believe my interest remains faint). I knew very few lawyers, however, and I had only a vague notion of what lawyers do, other than what one gathers from movies and television. Following college, I worked as a copy editor and reporter for The Minneapolis Star while attending law school at the University of Minnesota. I approach today's topic from the lowly vantage point of a recovering reporter.

Gideon's Trumpet taught us something about how to educate the public about law, about how to communicate law in a way that the public will understand it and respect it. (2) Cases are stories about real people. The legal journalism spawned by Gideon's Trumpet has deepened public understanding and appreciation of American law and has served as an important counterweight to the shallow criticisms of lawyers, judges, and lawmakers that populate the ever-proliferating media, much of which currently functions, apparently, without the need for editors.

Early in my legal career, I was a law clerk in federal district court, and I drafted orders and opinions that were the kind of ordinary legal analysis that one can acquire in law school. The intended audience was the judge for whom I clerked and the lawyers and their clients. If he decided to put it out as a published decision or opinion, the audience would be broadened to include lawyers in the community or those who are interested in the kind of case that was being decided. The judge for whom I clerked believed, probably correctly, that few district court opinions were worth reading and so he seldom chose opinions to publish in the Federal Supplement Reporter. In short, our words were intended usually for a very small audience. As such, they were written in code or the jargon of judicial opinion writing, part of the secret language that we, who are members of the Amalgamated Lawyers and Judges of America, use to keep our shop closed.

Forty years ago, the idea that a court might have a public information officer, for example, was unimaginable. It was even more absurd to imagine that a reporter could call a judge and ask the judge what he or she meant by a particular turn of phrase. Reporters, from the mainstream media (or should I say the "only-stream" media?) of newspapers, television, and radio were left to their own wits to ascertain what a judicial opinion might mean and to try to communicate that interpretation to the public.

As law became more of a publicly traded commodity in the 1990s, courts, including the Supreme Court of Missouri, began to hire public information officers. It may strike you as odd, when you think about it, as to why a court that communicates with words would need someone assigned to explain to the wordsmiths of the media--and sometimes to the public itself--what judges meant by the collections of words in their judicial opinions. But today, we take it for granted that public information officers are essential to the operation of a state supreme court, and although in the abstract I find this to be curious, I was happy to have worked with the Supreme Court of Missouri's Communications Counsel, Beth Riggert, who is participating in this symposium. Beth was very valuable in helping me write speeches and monthly...