New York Times

WASHINGTON — Justice Antonin Scalia has a sharp tongue and a cutting writing style. His signature mode is sarcasm.

It was on display last week when a lawyer made the mistake of saying that Justice Scalia was right — but only “in a literal sense.”

The justice pounced. “Oh, I see,” he said. “What sense are we talking here? Poetic?”

There was laughter in the courtroom, and the lawyer was knocked off his stride.

The moment was routine. And there is little question that Justice Scalia is the most sarcastic member of the Supreme Court.

But it is one thing to make that assertion. It is another to quantify it.

For that, you would need a Sarcasm Index.

Luckily, we live in an empirical age. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor and political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, has developed the necessary tools.

Justice Scalia registered 2.78 on Professor Hasen’s index, dwarfing the showings of every justice he has served with. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. came in a very distant second, at 0.43. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not even register.

Professor Hasen’s methodology is clever but not airtight. He considered assessments of Supreme Court opinions in law review articles from 1986, when Justice Scalia joined the court, through the end of 2013.

There were 134 opinions described as sarcastic or caustic, and Justice Scalia wrote 75 of them, more than all the other justices combined. The index took that number and divided it by the number of years the justice has served.

Several methodological objections come to mind. One is that law professors tend to be liberal and so may be more apt to criticize Justice Scalia, a conservative. But the rest of the index is about equally divided between liberal and conservative justices.

Another possible objection is that people repeat the conventional wisdom and reinforce stereotypes. Justice Scalia may be sarcastic in the way President Gerald R. Ford was said to have been clumsy and Vice President Dan Quayle dim.

In an interview, Professor Hasen said he had taken that possibility into account. “My control for that,” he said, “is that I live in the real world.”

Justice Scalia might have a different objection. “I’m a snoot,” he once said.

“Snoots are those who are nit-pickers for the mot juste, for using a word precisely the way it should be used,” he explained.

Professor Hasen, on the other hand, used a broad definition of sarcasm.

“We’re talking about a combination of harsh language and irony,” he said. Many standard reference works agree, defining sarcasm to include hostile or contemptuous remarks.

But Justice Scalia would probably differ, based on a database search that revealed him to be a student of the question. He seemed to define sarcasm in a narrower way, as limited to saying one thing while meaning another.

The word sarcasm or a variant appeared five times in Supreme Court opinions since he joined the court, and he is the author of four of those opinions. (The fifth use of the word was in a quotation.) All four used the narrower definition.

In 1994, he rejected the argument that “modify” can mean “to change fundamentally.”

“ ‘Modify,’ in our view, connotes moderate change,” he wrote. “It might be good English to say that the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility, but only because there is a figure of speech called understatement and a literary device known as sarcasm.”

In a 2000 dissent, he mocked the majority’s reasoning as “a wonderful replication (except for its lack of sarcasm) of Anatole France’s observation that ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.’ ”

In a 2006 dissent, he said the majority’s assertion that something not obvious was plainly so “rises to the level of sarcasm.”

And in a 2013 dissent, he said opponents of the ratification of the Constitution “sarcastically predicted that the general, suspicionless warrant would be among the Constitution’s ‘blessings.’ ”

All of those examples concern sarcasm in the sense of irony. If the Sarcasm Index is to satisfy a snoot, it may need an adjustment. But Justice Scalia’s primacy does not seem threatened under the narrower standard.

Journalists like conflict and quotable remarks and so are indulgent of Justice Scalia’s sarcasm. Professor Hasen, like many lawyers and scholars, disagrees.

“I think it is a bad thing,” he said. “There is a great deal of value to civility, especially when the court is writing in a sensitive area.”

It is also possible that Justice Scalia’s sarcasm is counterproductive, alienating potential allies and inviting misreading. His deadpan put-downs of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy, for instance, cannot have helped his relationships with them.

And his acid dissent in a 2013 gay rights case helped propel the cause of same-sex marriage. The “legalistic argle-bargle” in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, Justice Scalia wrote, suggested that it was only a matter of time until the court established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Lower court judges eagerly treated Justice Scalia’s critique as prophecy, propelling the issue back to the Supreme Court, which on Friday agreed to hear four same-sex marriage cases. Should the court rule in favor of the couples seeking to marry, Justice Scalia’s dissent will be one for the ages.