Judging Style: The Case Of Bush Versus Gore

The judgments by members of the US Supreme Court in the 2000 case of Bush versus Gore remain controversial to the present. We use text mining and machine learning methods to compare the word usage patterns of Supreme Court Justices in order to explore the likely authorship of both the anonymous 5-4 per curiam decision in this case and the concurrence that is attributed to Chief Justice Rehnquist, with Scalia and Thomas joining. An analysis of high and medium frequency words suggests that Justice Kennedy was likely the main contributor to the per curiam decision. A similar analysis of the concurrence, however, suggests that Justice Scalia may have played a more central role than the document's purported author, Justice Rehnquist. Our analysis indicates that while Chief Justice Rehnquist was likely to have been the crafter of the document, much of the more forceful language of the concurrence resonates more clearly with a vocabulary that is indicative of Justice Scalia.