David Foster Wallace says he is a genius. Now Bryan Garner, editor of Black’s Law Dictionary since its seventh edition and the acknowledged eminence grise of legalese, boldly goes where no one has gone before: he interviews the US Supreme Court justices on video.

Unedited and available for free viewing at Garner’s website, LawProse, the videos make riveting viewing. Eight of the nine justices are caught on camera. Only Justice David Souter declined the interview.

This collection might well have been titled LawTV Unplugged. It is remarkable not only because it has never been done before, anywhere, but also for the scorching candour with which the judges, usually the most reticent and wary members of society, speak their minds. Imagine the navarasas of Indian natyashastra transplanted into the US Supreme Court. Anger, despair, joy, passion, terror—they’re all there, and they’re all related to words in law.

Given how much they write, and how turgid their writing usually is, one might expect every one of them to have been comfortable with language and writing from very early on. For some of them this is indeed the case: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s teacher (at Cornell University) was none other than the legendary Vladimir Nabokov. Along with Anthony Burgess, Nabokov was the kind of writer lexicographers probably read to see what’s new with the English language. (Sadly, that position is now occupied by the idiotic patois of cell phones). Words couldn’t possibly have held any terror for Ginsburg. But Samuel Alito says that writing, in his early school years, was traumatic. And Clarence Thomas claims not to have been comfortable with modern English till he was in his twenties; till then he used nothing but a local dialect.

The judges’ statements are often bewildering. Some hate lengthy briefs (Roberts, Breyer); some dislike summaries (Scalia), while others think they are invaluable (Thomas, who likens them to previews of TV shows). What is an appellate lawyer supposed to make of this jumble of idiosyncrasies? Put in a summary to please Thomas and risk upsetting Scalia?

Scalia hates trite phrases, like “a precedent and its progeny”. He particularly abhors typographical errors. Scalia points out that typos murder credibility. If a draughtsman can’t proof his written material, how careful is he likely to be on the law? Contrast this with our own approach: we are completely indifferent to even the most egregious typographical errors, including in judgements.

The likes and dislikes can seem like pettifogging at times. John Roberts, Chief Justice, is allergic to citations of websites and URLs. He thinks “all those letters strung together” are “obscene”. This is rank silliness, for there’s simply no alternative. Note, though, that Roberts does not object to the web citations themselves, only the manner of citation.

Garner himself must have been delighted by another of Roberts’s pet foibles, his dislike of the word “which”. He thinks it should almost never be used, as it is archaic. Which, incidentally, it is not.

Anthony Kennedy weighs in with a broadside against linguistic abuse. He’s not wrong. “Existential”, for instance, is a word now thoroughly disfigured by the Bush administration, which (that word again!) treats it as a synonym for “a struggle for survival”. Islamic fundamentalism, Dick Cheney says, is an existential problem. In 2005, a US Senator said bioterrorism was the biggest existential problem. Blair has done it, too. In a brilliant essay in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, William Safire dismembered these linguistic terrorists. In the Garner tapes, Kennedy says these new-fangled words (everything “-ize”, for example, “inventivize”) are like flashy neckties—very, very declass&eacute.

The videos have been online since January, and are part of a work in progress as Garner continues to interview judges, lawyers and writers in his one-man crusade for greater clarity in legal writing. Garner and Scalia have co-authored a forthcoming book titled “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.” This should be interesting, if a little naïve, particularly if one has to deal with Scalia.

Whether these interviews actually do have a collective cohesion (leave aside a unified institutional wisdom) is hard to say. What does seem to come through is the judges’ thinly-concealed impatience for anyone’s word but their own, and a savage intolerance for even the most venial linguistic or grammatical peccadillo.

In one of the segments, Garner asks Kennedy to identify a good writing style for lawyers. Playing to the gallery, Kennedy says,

“Lucid. Cogent. Succinct. Interesting. Informative. Convincing.”

This is no formula for anything. What is lucid to one judge is obtuse to another. An argument that one finds cogent another might call diffuse. And interesting, surely, is a very, very personal preference.

Ironically, these six elements that Kennedy says are the hallmark of a good writing style don’t always figure in the Court’s own opinions.

Especially convincing.

Especially recently.