Who does the talking

Oral argument is the one part of a Supreme Court case you can actually hear. An advocate gets a lectern and a plan; the justices get an hour to interrupt it. None of it decides the case on its own, but all of it is transcribed and attributed, which means the floor time is a thing you can count — and once you count it, the nine turn out to divide the hour about as unevenly as they divide everything else.

The newest justice talks the most

Rank the current nine by their typical share of the bench’s words and the leader is not a veteran. It is Jackson, appointed in 2022, who takes about 20.6% of everything the justices say in a term — comfortably ahead of Kagan and Sotomayor, the two who held that title for a decade. At the other end, Thomas accounts for just 3.5%. That is close to a six-to-one gap between the most and least talkative members of the same bench.

Show the data

Justice	Share of words (%)
Jackson	20.6
Kagan	14
Sotomayor	13.8
Gorsuch	11.5
Alito	10.6
Kavanaugh	10.1
Roberts	10.1
Barrett	9.4
Thomas	3.5

Source: Oral-argument transcripts via Oyez; counted in scripts/fetch-scotus.mjs

Share is a fair way to compare justices who joined at different times — it asks how much of a given hour belongs to each of them, not how many hours they have sat through. On that footing a first-year justice really can lead the Court, and this one does.

Questions, or speeches

Sheer volume hides two very different ways to spend a turn. Roberts speaks far more often than anyone — 9,915 separate turns across these terms — yet at only about 18.9 words each. As Chief Justice he spends much of the hour running the floor: recognizing counsel, keeping time, handing off between colleagues. Those are turns, but they are not questions.

Others do the reverse. Kagan averages 43.6 words a turn, asking fewer questions and building each one out into a paragraph, hypothetical and all. The two styles pull in opposite directions, and a justice can rank high on one measure while sitting low on the other.

Show the data

Justice	Words / turn
Kagan	43.6
Jackson	43.5
Barrett	40.1
Alito	34.9
Sotomayor	31.3
Kavanaugh	30.7
Gorsuch	29.2
Thomas	28.5
Roberts	18.9

Source: Oral-argument transcripts via Oyez

The chart runs from the speech-givers down to the traffic cop. Roberts anchors the low end not because he has little to say but because so much of what he says is procedure — the connective tissue that keeps an hour with nine interrupters from collapsing into a scrum.

Between those poles sit two different high-volume styles. Sotomayor interjects more often than anyone but the Chief, in short bursts that keep an advocate honest sentence by sentence. Kagan speaks less frequently but at far greater length, letting a single question run until it has walked the lawyer into a corner. The two arrive at nearly the same share of the hour by opposite routes — one by frequency, the other by duration — which is why a lone leaderboard flattens more than it shows. Volume is a sum; how you reach it is the tell.

The Thomas turn

For most of his tenure, the story of Clarence Thomas at oral argument was that there wasn’t one. In the 2018 term he spoke 41 words — not per argument, but the whole term. He had gone years at a stretch without asking a single question, and the silence had become one of the few things casual Court-watchers knew about him.

Then the pandemic changed the format. Starting in May 2020 the Court heard argument by telephone, each justice questioning in turn, in order of seniority, with no scramble to jump in. Thomas, second in seniority only to the Chief, suddenly had a guaranteed opening every time — and he took it. By the 2020 term he was at 6.9% of the bench’s words, out-talking colleagues who had been questioning advocates for years.

The telling part is what happened next. When the Court went back to an in-person, free-for-all format, Thomas did not go quiet again. He has settled around 3.5% — well below the leaders, but a world away from where he started. A temporary change to the seating chart undid a habit fifteen years in the making.

• Thomas
• Kagan
• Sotomayor

Show the data

Term	Thomas	Kagan	Sotomayor
2018	0	15.7	17.4
2019	1.3	14.7	15.1
2020	6.9	12.6	12.2
2021	5	14.9	13.2
2022	4.2	13.2	13.3
2023	3.5	12.9	11.4

Source: Oral-argument transcripts via Oyez

The bench and the bar

Step back from which justice talks to how much the justices talk at all. In every one of these terms the nine take more than a third of the words spoken at their own hearings, and the share has crept upward — from a low of 34.6% to 39.3% in the most recent term. The advocates who came to argue are left with a shrinking majority of an hour that is nominally theirs.

Show the data

Term	Justices
2018	36.6
2019	34.6
2020	38.9
2021	36.7
2022	37.9
2023	39.3

Source: Oral-argument transcripts via Oyez

That drift is not a quirk of these six terms. Studies of the modern Court going back decades find the same thing: today’s justices interrupt more, talk longer, and tip their hands more than the famously “cold” benches of the mid-century did. The hour has not changed length. The people on the bench have just decided to use more of it.

It matters more than a manners note. Researchers who have read the tea leaves of argument find that the advocate who draws more questions — and more words — tends to be the one who loses, and that the tilt of the questioning predicts the vote better than chance. If the justices are taking an ever-larger share of an hour that was built for the lawyers to persuade them, oral argument is quietly turning into something else: less a hearing than a bench conference the public is allowed to overhear.