How to Write a Judgment: Creative Writing and International Adjudication

This article focuses on the craft of writing as an essential component of judicial practice. After explaining why writing matters and why the legal scholar can rely on creative writing to describe judicial writing, the article focuses on the sentence, the characters, and the plot as the basic units of the text. The law is made of words and basic rules of composition can reveal its deeper mechanisms. Whether to include an adverb to highlight importance, to hide the subject of a sentence to construct an objective truth, or to order the arguments in a favourable structure, writers’ choices reflect the balance of the counteracting interests represented in the judicial proceeding. The article relies both on the close reading of several judgments of international courts and the distant reading of the corpus of decisions of the International Court of Justice, analyzed through computational analysis.