Judge Selya enlivened his writing with original vocabulary and colorful figures of speech. “Selyaisms” included asseverate, crapulous and sockdolager.
Bruce M. Selya, a federal judge who issued more than 1,800 opinions and was celebrated (and occasionally chided) for a sesquipedalian writing style — that is, his use of long words that sent readers scrambling for a dictionary — died on Feb. 22 in Providence, R.I. He was 90.
His family announced his death.
A Republican who was active in electoral politics before President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the bench in 1982, Judge Selya issued opinions that did not conform to a predictable conservative ideology.
Last year, he was part of a court panel that upheld Rhode Island’s ban on high-capacity gun magazines, having continued to work as a senior judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston until his death.
In 1998, he struck down the use of racial preferences in student admissions to Boston Latin School in the first ruling from an appeals court that restricted affirmative action in public schools, a long-sought goal of conservatives.
On the other hand, he sided with a liberal understanding of the separation of church and state when he ruled in 2021 that Boston could bar a Christian group from flying a religious flag at a ceremony outside City Hall.
The United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed Judge Selya, saying that the free-speech rights of the religious group prevailed.