First Circuit Senior Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson is 75 years old, but you wouldn’t know it from this opinion.
Channeling her inner Gen Z, Judge Thompson put out a lengthy bankruptcy opinion that took a sledgehammer to the air of formality that’s surrounded legal opinions since… well, forever. The effect is jarring to anyone familiar with federal judicial opinions. To call it unorthodox undersells it.
And yet, read in full, the opinion untangles a complicated, multiyear bankruptcy saga in a readable — dare I say, pleasant — 40-page account. Honestly, I expected to find myself more critical of this opinion. I’ve been quite critical of judges exploiting the inherent power imbalance to score laughs at the expense of litigants. That said, this isn’t a criminal defendant or fraud victim watching their world become a judicial plaything — it’s a gnarly corporate bankruptcy dispute. In that context, this all… kind of works?
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Anyway, it’s safe to say that I’m the minority opinion on this one:
Instituto Médico del Norte v. Greengift Capital does, in fact, fill in the deets, but the opening actually does accomplish the time-honored role of SparkNotes by letting us know the main characters, their motivations, and the source of their dispute with the exact same approach that helped us avoid reading The Scarlet Letter.
Who am I kidding? It was Cliff’s Notes then. And I did read The Scarlett Letter. The Mayor of Casterbridge on the other hand….
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We’ll start at the beginning, of course. Back in 1984, Instituto obtained a loan to the tune of $10,683,230 from Ponce Bank to build a hospital in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico.
But Instituto and Ponce quickly fell into a dispute. The dispute’s details are admittedly complicated and not well-documented in the record before us, but here’s what we can glean from the parties’ materials….
This reads like a conversation with your good friend Judge Thompson giving you all the gossip she’s heard about these companies. That’s not how opinions are usually written, but it’s so much more engaging.
But admittedly — and with no disrespect intended towards the bankruptcy court — we struggle to make sense of several key determinations in its dispositive order. We know that bankruptcy courts are quite busy, and they also don’t have an obligation to make specific findings of fact or to elaborate on their decisions when resolving motions for summary judgment.
Given the byzantine nature of this dispute, the bankruptcy court probably couldn’t lay it all out without taking the sort of narrative approach employed here.
While Instituto’s bankruptcy plan was being worked out, Instituto and Oriental got into it about how much Oriental should be paid. But they worked it out.
Standard legal writing? No. But, likely a far better picture of what happened than any formal language could convey. The whole dispute drips with the pettiness of a middle school cafeteria incident and would “Instituto and Oriental arrived at an impasse over the proper treatment of the allowed secured claim before reaching a temporary resolution” followed by three paragraphs nobody cares about send the reader that same context?
Not for nothing, if we want to stop AI from training itself to replace human legal writers, Judge Thompson is doing the Lord’s work in messing up the algorithm.
Oh, and then there are the defined terms:
The final plan (which we uncreatively christen “The Plan”) approved by the bankruptcy court incorporated most of the above-reproduced language, but not all.
That’s how all the definitions play out. To all the 1Ls out there: do this, watch your legal writing instructor’s head explode, and then say “sorry, I guess I just care more about modeling my work on a distinguished federal appellate judge than you do.”
Other moments over the following pages: “And then things began to go off the rails,” “Thus spawned more motions,” and, referring to a bankruptcy court determination “(whatever that means).”
With those five sentences, the litigation before the bankruptcy court came to an end.
This line actually stood out the most. The bankruptcy opinion was plenty formal, gathering 1,000 exhibits and proceeding with the cadence of authority before delivering its curt conclusion. The First Circuit opinion is saying — both in substance and with this style — that stiff legalese isn’t always rigor. Sometimes it functions as camouflage for decisions that don’t stand up to the elevator pitch test. To that end, the unanimous First Circuit panel isn’t disrespecting a fellow judge — which is a much more disturbing trend in legal writing than using “deets” — but explaining that formality can become a cage that leads to the wrong result.
Ultimately, the holding here is that litigants were owed an explanation, and the court delivered it in plain (perhaps too plain for many) terms.
Just imagine the legitimacy crisis that could result if a court ran around issuing deeply significant rulings while stubbornly refusing to provide its reasoning! I mean, that wouldn’t be as serious as a judge using the word “deets,” but I’m sure it would be pretty bad.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.