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Writing, Cognition, And The Nature Of The Judicial Function, Chad Oldfather

Chad M Oldfather

Prior commentators, including many judges, have observed that writing provides an important discipline on the judicial decisionmaking process. Those commentators have uniformly assumed that the effect will always be positive – that is, that a decision rendered pursuant to a process that includes a written justification will always be better (however better is to be measured) than a decision unaccompanied by writing. According to this view, we should always, all things being equal, prefer a decision accompanied by an opinion to one without. All things are not equal, of course, and there are many situations in which the costs of …