About: Poetry in judicial opinions

While judicial opinions are usually matter-of-fact, technical, and serious, judges occasionally incorporate poetry into their writing. The practice has been criticised as self-aggrandising and demeaning by some scholars, but judges who use verse in their opinions do so to communicate with particular audiences, signal the importance of a case, or to address the emotional components of a legal dispute. For example, legal scholars Edward J. Eberle and Bernhard Grossfeld point to Chief Justice William Rehnquist's dissent in Texas v. Johnson (1989) as a powerful example of using poetic modes in judicial writing to demonstrate an argument.