Less is more

Money quotation from Judge Posner, on why the proliferation of law clerks and resources at the Supreme Court has not led neither to better economies of decision, nor qualitatively superior outcomes:

The average opinion is longer today, and there are more dissenting and concurring opinions, and so the total word output of the Court is greater; but whether this spells improvement may be doubted.

But aren't the cases more difficult today? I don't think so. Although American law is more complex than it was in the 1930s, this is primarily because of developments in areas of law--securities regulation, antitrust, taxation, federal pension law, intellectual property in high-technology areas such as computer software and pharmaceutical drugs, and complex financial and other commercial transactions--that the Court tends to shy away from in favor of constitutional and criminal cases. (This aversion may reflect the tastes and the aptitudes of the law clerks, whose certiorari memos influence the justices' decisions to grant or deny review.) And constitutional cases are often "difficult" in the sense of eluding satisfactory resolution. They are not inherently more complex. Instead they are indeterminate, as a consequence of the vagueness and antiquity of the constitutional text, and of the emotionality and political sensitivity that so many constitutional cases engender.