Honors 351: Judging Politics: U.S. Constitutional Law & Moot Court

Persuading the Supreme Court leverages the very written arguments submitted to the Court to shed light on both their construction and impact. Drawing on more than 25,000 party and amicus briefs led between 1984 and 2015 and the text of the related court opinions.It offers new evidence that the resource advantage enjoyed by some parties likely stems from both the ability of their experienced attorneys to craft excellent briefs and their reputations with the justices. The analyses also reveal that information operates differently in terms of influencing who wins and what policy is announced. Using those original interviews and quantitative analyses of a rich original dataset of tens of thousands of briefs, with measures built using sophisticated natural language processing tools, Hazelton and Hinkle investigate the factors that influence what information litigants and their attorneys provide to the Supreme Court and what the justices and their clerks do with that information in deciding cases that set legal policy for the entire country.

What would United States Supreme Court opinions look like if key decisions on gender issues were written with a feminist perspective? Feminist Judgments brings together a group of scholars and lawyers to rewrite, using feminist reasoning, the most significant US Supreme Court cases on gender from the 1800s to the present day. The twenty-five opinions in this volume demonstrate that judges with feminist viewpoints could have changed the course of the law. The rewritten decisions reveal that previously accepted judicial outcomes were not necessary or inevitable and demonstrate that feminist reasoning increases the judicial capacity for justice. Feminist Judgments opens a path for a long overdue discussion of the real impact of judicial diversity on the law as well as the influence of perspective on judging.

All judges legitimize their decisions in writing, but US Supreme Court justices depend on public acceptance to a unique degree. Previous studies of judicial opinions have explored rhetorical strategies that produce legitimacy, but none have examined the laudatory, even operatic, forms of writing Supreme Court justices have used to justify fundamental rights decisions. Doug Coulson demonstrates that such "judicial rhapsodies" are not an aberration but a central feature of judicial discourse. First examining the classical origins of divisions between law and rhetoric, Coulson tracks what he calls an epideictic register--highly affective forms of expression that utilize hyperbole, amplification, and vocabularies of praise--through a surprising number of landmark Supreme Court opinions. Judicial Rhapsodies recovers and revalues these instances as significant to establishing and maintaining shared perspectives that form the basis for common experience and cooperation.