As seen by the recent majority opinion,(Dobbs v. JACKSON WOMEN'S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, 2022), which overturns the federal protection of the right to abortion in the United States of America, judicial opinions of the American Supreme Court have wide-reaching impact. Despite this, very little is known about their move (Swales, 1990) structure (Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2020). This paper proposes a first model of American judicial opinions move structure.
While little linguistic research on the actual structure of opinions exists (Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2020), there are many resources about writing judicial opinions (Vance, 2011). These take a prescriptive rather than descriptive approach. In addition, often used in law schools, they are a legal rather than a linguistic source. Despite their importance in legal training, no model has been constructed using the recommendations contained in these manuals nor is it clear if there is a convergence towards one model or several models.
This paper proposes a typology of structures proposed in 45 manuals as part of a larger project on linguistically detecting the move structure of these documents. Our results show that while there is a general trend towards a prototypical structure, the advice on structure varies from manual to manual. Furthermore, it is generally based on individual practitioners' experience rather than corpora.
References
Dobbs v. JACKSON WOMEN'S HEALTH ORGANIZATION, (Supreme Court 2022).
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2020). Move Analysis of Legal Justifications in Constitutional Tribunal Judgments in Poland: What They Share and What They Do Not. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique, 33(3), 581–600. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09700-1
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.
Vance, R. C. (2011). Judicial Opinion Writing: An Annotated Bibliography. 17 Legal Writing 197.
