Supreme Court Opinion Uses “Cleaned Up” Technique for First Time (3/3/21)

This morning’s NLJ Supreme Court Brief Email had this item (authored by Tony Mauro):  How SCOTUS Finally Got 'Cleaned Up.'  Mauro's article points to this quote from Justice Thomas' unanimous opinion in Brownback v. King, ___ U.S. ___, ___ S.Ct. ___, 2021 U.S. LEXIS 1198 (2021), here (emphasis supplied):

To “trigge[r] the doctrine of res judicata or claim preclusion” a judgment must be “‘on the merits.’” Semtek Int’l Inc. v. Lockheed Martin Corp., 531 U. S. 497, 502 (2001). Under that doctrine as it existed in 1946, a judgment is “on the merits” if the underlying decision “actually passes directly on the substance of a particular claim before the court.” Id., at 501–502 (cleaned up).

Focusing just on the bold-face sentence, here is the sentence from the Semtek opinion:  

The original connotation of an "on the merits" adjudication is one that actually "pass[es] directly on the substance of [a particular] claim" before the court.

The cleaned up quote looks much tidier and accessible to the reader than does the original in the Semtek opinion.  That is the point.

As explained in Mauro's article:

"The court's holding is the words that are used, not the punctuation," said Metzler, who promoted the phrase persistently on his widely-read Twitter feed Supreme Court Places and in an article published in the Journal of Appellate Practice and Process. In that article, Metzler complained that with the traditional clutter, citations "become an unwieldy mess packed with case cites and parenthetical information that tests the reader's ability to remember the point that the author was trying to make by using the quotation in the first place." Metzler is also the editor of previously unshared style guides of the Supreme Court and Solicitor General.

His campaign to propagate the phrase eventually caught on, and it found its way into all federal circuit courts. "We should welcome any effort to make judicial opinions more readable and accessible to every American citizen," said Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who has used the phrase. "To paraphrase my friends at the Green Bag, Citations should not look like goulash." Metzler's latest tally found that the phrase was used more than 5,000 times by lawyers and judges alike. But until last week, it never made it to the holy grail of the Supreme Court.

Recently, there had been hints that the high court was paying attention, Metzler said. Phrases like "quotation modified" or "quotation altered" were being used in Supreme Court decisions with the same purpose. Metzler wouldn't speculate on why "(cleaned up)" finally made it to the court and to Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the Brownback opinion.

But here is a guess: as of January 13, the Supreme Court has a new Reporter of Decisions named Rebecca Womeldorf. Part of her job is editing-or perhaps cleaning up-the court's opinions.

I have been using the cleaned up technique since I first learned of it from Bryan Garner’s Blog entry titled Law Prose Lesson 303: Cleaned Up Quotations and Citations (Bryan Garner Law Prose Blog June 2018), here.  Readers will recall that, for some time now, I explain the technique in a page link in the right hand column, titled Cleaning Up Quotes and Cites for Readability -- The "Cleaned Up" Technique, here.

Thanks Jack Metzler and thanks Justice Thomas.

This blog post is cross-posted on my Federal Tax Crimes Blog, here.