Scalia, right? Nope. Scalia barely cracks the top ten, behind Alito, Kennedy, Thomas, and even Breyer. The actual measure is “friendliness” rather than meanness, and these guys have among the lowest friendliness scores, which is the percentage of positive words used by justices in their opinions minus the percentage of negative words. (Negative and positive words taken from here.)

The friendliness score comes from A Quantitative Analysis of Trends in Writing Style on the U.S. Supreme Court, a new paper by Keith Carlson, Michael Livermore, and Daniel Rockmore, and it contains all kinds of other fun stuff, like the influence of law clerks on judicial writing style. The authors are pioneers in the use of textual analysis to analyze supreme court opinions. One of their findings is that opinions of modern justices are a lot less friendly than the opinions of earlier justices. (They are also written at a lower grade level.)

The friendliest justice–by a long shot–is John Jay, reflecting perhaps his experience as a diplomat. But he wrote very few opinions. I’m therefore handing the title to #2, Oliver Ellsworth. And the meanest? An obscure, one-term justice named Thomas Johnson. [N.B.: an earlier version of this post confused him with William Johnson. The ABA Journal correctly identified him.]