6 lessons from the writing of Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch

Stipulated: We are more likely to praise the elegant prose of writers we agree with politically than the screeds of those misinformed dopes on the other side of the aisle.

If that’s true, we at Ragan Communications cannot hope to resolve this year’s brawls and fistfights over the question that divides the republic: How good (or bad) is the writing of Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch?

Those on the right, we suspect, will be more inclined to agree with what The New York Times calls the conservative justice’s “reputation for lively, finely tuned prose.”

Those on the left are more likely to be irked by a style that a Slate writer cited by the Times calls “a crime against the English language.”

Either way, a brawl has broken out. The Gorsuch prose question seems to be the most contentious schism dividing the legal community—and the most serious cause of police reports from seedier watering holes, where angry lawyers and appalled writers have been crashing tufted-leather chairs and bottles of 12-year-old single malt whisky over one another’s heads.