Ideologies of Supreme Court Justices: Quantitative Thematic Analysis of Multiple Opinions of “Bush v. Gore 2000”

Ruina Chen; Haitao Liu

doi:10.1515/glot-2015-0015

Article

Ideologies of Supreme Court Justices: Quantitative Thematic Analysis of Multiple Opinions of “Bush v. Gore 2000”

Ruina Chen and Haitao Liu

Published/Copyright: December 1, 2015

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From the journal Glottotheory Volume 6 Issue 2

Abstract

Judicial ideology is a latent trait that cannot be directly observed; its measurement must rely upon inferences drawn from observable traits or properties. In this paper, we assume that judicial ideologies of Supreme Court Justices may be inferred from the contents or themes of their authorial opinion texts, which embody their jurisprudential interpretation and reasoning on particular disputes of hard cases. The contents or themes of six opinion texts of “Bush v. Gore 2000” are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the latter as the focus. An indicator is borrowed from quantitative linguistics (QL) to quantify individual thematic words which contribute to the contents or themes of the text, that is, “thematic concentration” (TC). Our research yields the following results: First, both the highest and lowest TC value are found in the dissenting opinions, which may indicate the dynamism of thematic concentration of this type of opinion; Second, the common “thematic words” distilled from six opinions help to lexically profile the key “content domain” of this case; Third, the only thematic word “state” which appears in almost all opinion texts can be regarded as representing the most fundamental characteristic of the genre of appellate court opinions; Fourth, there exists a significant difference of TC in texts between the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion but not within the majority opinion, indicating that TC can reflect in a correct direction of the ideological stances of Supreme Court Justices; Fifth, TC in texts of three opinions get together, and qualitative analysis of these three opinions also shows that they concentrate on similar themes. The application of TC still have some challenges, but at least it offers an alternative path to measure ideologies of Supreme Court Justices, which contributes to the progress and development of forensic linguistics.

Keywords: judicial ideology; thematic concentration; statistical methods; opinions

Funding statement: Funding: This research is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China for the project “Quantitative Linguistic Research of Text Features in English and Chinese” (Grant No. 15BYY098) and the General Social Science Foundation of Guizhou University for the project “Corpus-Based Research of Legal Texts”(Grant No. GDYB 2013012).

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Published Online: 2015-12-1

Published in Print: 2015-12-1

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https://doi.org/10.1515/glot-2015-0015

Keywords for this article

judicial ideology; thematic concentration; statistical methods; opinions