By Paul Warchuk, August 15, 2026
The Supreme Court of Canada wants governments to make justice more accessible. It might start by making its own judgments shorter.
On June 9, 2026, Chief Justice Richard Wagner held his annual news conference. The legal system is under strain, he warned. Trials are running past their constitutional limits. Self-represented litigants are arriving at his court in record numbers. Judges are burning out. His remedy, as always: governments should spend more on the courts and lawyers should do more work pro bono.
Missing from the Chief Justice’s remarks was reflection inward. What can the Supreme Court do to improve access to justice? Despite frequently emphasizing that goal, the Court’s own initiatives appear rather thin. It has made a children’s book, prepared brief plain-language summaries, and barred lawyers representing interveners from appearing in person — all in the name of access to justice. But these actions don’t have concrete impacts on trial delays or legal costs. The Court’s judgments do — not only in their substance but in how they are written and how long they are.
On a podcast episode last year, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis identified the Supreme Court’s written decisions as an area where it had improved access to justice: “We are very much aware that what we write is for the public. It’s part of the accountability of the court to explain our decision in a way that the public can understand.” She further explained, “we use plain language so that people can understand. I write an overview that will tell a layperson what the case is about, what I decide, and why I decide it.”
The plain language claim is testable. Standard readability measures examine sentence length and polysyllabic word density to assign a grade level. On the most widely used of them, the Flesch-Kincaid scale, the Court’s readability scores have been stable since the 1980s. Under Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin (2000–2017), the Court’s judgments averaged a score of 10.7. Under Chief Justice Wagner (2018–present), they score 10.6. In other words, the language used by the Court today is no more “plain” than that used by judges of the past 40 years.
There is, however, one significant change to the Supreme Court’s judgments in recent years: judgment length. In 2017, the year before Richard Wagner became Chief Justice, the mean Supreme Court judgment ran 10,758 words. In 2025, it ran 20,324 words. To put that into perspective, the average judgment length now rivals the average Shakespearean play. And that’s just the average. More than a dozen judgments of the Wagner Court are more than 40,000 words, with one reaching over 88,000 words. Lest you think these behemoths are responsible for the increasing average, the median length has more than doubled. Simply put, each of the past eight years represents one of the eight most verbose years in Supreme Court history.
Common sense tells us that judgments that take three hours to read don’t reduce trial delays or legal costs. They do the opposite. For judges, it means twice the time to read the precedents necessary to prepare for their cases. For litigants with lawyers, it means twice the cost. For litigants without lawyers, like the 43 per cent of litigants who are now self-represented in leave applications to the Supreme Court, it might mean not reading at all. Research shows that those who begin reading lengthy judgments are less likely to finish or understand them because of the heavy cognitive burden that length imposes.
Length carries subtler costs as well. Retired US federal judge Richard Posner and lawyer Bryan Garner — leading voices in the movement toward clearer, more readable legal writing — have argued that increased length complicates judgments. The additional commentary and obiter dicta (observations not essential to the final decision of the case) make it harder to identify what the court actually decided. That uncertainty further increases costs on the whole system.
The Supreme Court is not alone. Judgments have been lengthening across the system for decades: the median British Columbia trial decision more than tripled between 1980 and 2018, and Quebec’s lower court decision length grew by about 40 per cent between 2003 and 2017. For a time, the Supreme Court’s judgments rose at a similar pace. They gradually increased from under 5,000 words in 1975 to more than 10,000 by the mid-1990s. Then they stopped. Mean judgment length held near 10,000 words for the better part of two decades before doubling in eight. Whatever is lengthening judgments everywhere else does not explain what happened at the Supreme Court.
At the same time as it has doubled judgment lengths, the Court has slashed the number of cases it hears by nearly half. Under Chief Justice McLachlin, the Court issued an average of 60 written judgments per year. Under Chief Justice Wagner, that figure has fallen to 36 per year. As the Court controls most of its own docket, choosing whether to grant a case leave to appeal, the shrinking caseload is a choice. And it is a choice that has left many lawyers scratching their heads, particularly those who practise civil and commercial law. As constitutional and criminal cases dominate the docket that remains, these other areas can go years between pronouncements. MLI Senior Fellow Gerard Kennedy was more circumspect in assessing the Court’s caseload in 2023, when the Court decided just 27 reserved appeals, the lowest since 1947. Among the reasons he offered was that each case may now require more of the Court, including longer reasons for judgment.
What, then, is causing these lengthy judgments? An examination of Supreme Court judgments from 1975 to 2025 does not reveal a sudden, sharp rise in the complexity of the cases. But there are a few factors that are correlated with increased judgment lengths.
The first is division: The Court is more fractured than at any time since 1975. Just 40 per cent of judgments are unanimous, compared to more than 60 per cent during Chief Justice McLachlin’s term. Dissenting and concurring judges are able to draft their own opinions, with each additional opinion adding words to the total judgment length. However, increased division cannot account for this change alone as the length of unanimous judgments has also roughly doubled, increasing from 6,440 words in 2017 to 12,236 in 2025.
The second factor is the growth in intervener participation. Interveners are third parties, typically advocacy organizations and industry groups that have an interest in the legal issues at stake. They are not the plaintiff or defendant and are not directly subject to the resulting court order. Traditionally, courts would only hear arguments by directly affected parties. However, with the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the increasing role of the Supreme Court as policymaker (named the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s policymaker of the year in 2014), the Court has welcomed these third-party groups to bring their perspectives to the Court.
Intervener participation began to grow around 2010; however, growth took off after 2017. In 2017, there were an average of 3.4 interveners per case. In 2024, there were an average of 7.3 interveners. As each intervener purports to bring a unique perspective and set of arguments, the Court is faced with answering a wider range of arguments in its judgment. Regression analysis supports this, finding that each intervener is associated with an additional 445 words. At current participation rates, interveners are correlated with more than 3,000 additional words per judgment.
A third factor is new judges. The four most prolix writers in the Court’s modern history are all recent appointees: Justices Nicholas Kasirer, Sheilah L. Martin, Mahmud Jamal, and Michelle O’Bonsawin, with Kasirer topping them out at an average of 15,350 words per solo opinion. But again, the new judges do not provide a complete answer. Every judge who sat under both Chief Justice McLachlin and Chief Justice Wagner is now writing longer than before: Rowe by 68 per cent, Côté by 46 per cent, Karakatsanis and Abella by 40 per cent, Brown by 39 per cent, Moldaver by 32 per cent. Even the Chief Justice himself is up 49 per cent.
How, then, to account for an average increase of 42 per cent among the same people doing the same job? The answer likely lies in the inner workings of the Court, including the increased reliance on law clerks. In addition, the increase in judgment length has been accompanied by an explosion in citations. The average judgment now contains 162 case citations. In contrast, the McLachlin Court averaged 57 citations per judgment. Citations to academic books and articles have more than tripled (moving from 8 per case to 28). American judges correlate mass citation with increased law clerk involvement. They explain that law clerks are recent law school graduates whose inexperience leads them to cite compulsively.
In 2017, the Court increased the number of law clerks per judge from three to four. Time available per file thus rose by one third, giving law clerks time to present their judges with ideas that they otherwise may not have had time to pursue. But in 2023, the Court went back down to three clerks, and this decrease has not had any apparent effect on judgment length.
Beyond looking at raw numbers, not much can be done to test the law clerk theory. Law clerks sign a secrecy undertaking as a condition of employment, covering deliberations and the internal processes of judges’ chambers. Further, Chief Justice Wagner placed a 50-year embargo on access to the Court’s judicial records in 2018 (a term even retired judges of the Court protested as too long).
What remains is the era itself. Controlling for panel size, number of opinions, parties, interveners, caseload, subject matter and the identity of the author, the Wagner era is associated with an additional 3,518 words per judgment. Restricting the analysis to the eight judges who served under both chiefs — holding personnel constant — the effect survives at 2,474 words. Something in the institutional environment, not in the law or the caseload, is adding thousands of words to every judgment. What that is — whether the Chief Justice’s distinct leadership style or some other internal change — is impossible to say for certain.
What is certain is that the increase in judgment length has occurred rapidly and is within the control of the Court. The Chief Justice has made accessibility the defining theme of his term and several members of the Court have said that clear decisions in clear language are part of access to justice. Shortening judgments will reduce strain on the legal system and improve accessibility. Of course, the justice system is facing more significant problems than the length of Supreme Court judgments. But reducing judgment length requires no appropriation from Parliament or donated hours from the bar. It only requires a conscious effort by nine judges to write less.
Paul Warchuk is an assistant professor at the University of New Brunswick Faculty of Law and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
