"New computer-driven research suggests that Supreme Court justices are getting grumpier, according to a new study by scholars at Dartmouth and the University of Virginia."

"This analysis was based on the percentage of positive words versus negative words. In addition, modern justices tend to produce more words and have a lower grade level than their predecessors."

Oh, jeez. Here we go again: If you use more periods and fewer semicolons, the computer will conclude that you are writing at a lower grade level. That's garbage. See how I just wrote a sentence on a dramatically lower grade level than the previous sentence? "Computer-driven" doesn't mean sophisticated. It just means that lots of data was crunched. Things that could be counted and that the researchers wanted to count were counted on a grand scale.

The authors included 107 justices through 2008 and ranked them based on negative words (“two-faced,” “problematic”) and positive words (“adventurous,” “pre-eminent”). The high court’s first chief justice, John Jay, ranked number one with a score of 1.55 percent friendliness rating. Numbers 103 through 106 are current members of the court, including Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito. Antonin Scalia earned the number 98 spot with a score of -0.69 percent friendliness.

Quite aside from whether we should assess a judge's friendliness/grumpiness based on which words he puts in the formal justification of his legal decision that we call an opinion, who determined which words should count as positive and which as negative? Why is "adventurous" considered positive — especially as you look at material that was written over a period of 200+ years? Some of the older meanings of the word are negative: "Full of risk or peril; hazardous, perilous, dangerous... Prone to incur risk; excessively venturesome; rashly daring" (OED). If a justice in 1800 called an argument "adventurous," was he saying something nice?

I suspect that negative words proliferate when justices indulge in writing long dissenting opinions. That doesn't necessarily mean they are grumpy or unfriendly. It might have more to do with feeling free to express oneself in somewhat emotive language, and that may have become more the style as the years wore on. If we feel free to express emotion, we give the language analysts more emotive words to count, and then they can calculate a ratio of positive to negative. But how can we compare that to what was written long ago, when judges may have favored concealed or processed emotion? There will not only be less to count but also a kind of caginess and subtle sarcasm and irony that the computer can't recognize. To take an example from a famous old case, what would a computer do with "the judges of the State courts are, and always will be, of as much learning, integrity, and wisdom as those of the courts of the United States (which we very cheerfully admit)"?  "Cheerfully" is such a positive word, but, in context, it's no, and there's certainly no reason to think that the Justice who wrote it was exuding any sort of friendliness.

But this is the kind of study that gets reported, the kind of is-Scalia-mean stuff the public loves.