Judicial genre

Last updated

Judicial genre is a particular category of written expression of legal opinions. It shares aspects of associated with distinct Literary genre that are often characterized by distinct attributes of characteristics such as literary technique, tone, and content. Studies indicate that there are sub genera distinctive to the US Supreme Court of the United States, and that this genre is becoming increasingly distinctive with time. [1]

Methods of characterizing judicial genre include metrics such as opinion length, complexity of structure for example use of complex, multi-part opinions with several concurrences and dissents. Robert Ferguson regards Judicial Opinion as a specific literary genre [2]

Analysis of judicial genre is increasing in sophistication for example with metadiscursive analysis in recent high visibility cases. [3] Some of the components of metadiscursive analysis include specific uses of clarifying devices for regular and special concurrences to both support and attack majority opinions.

Xifras' Theory of Legal Characters [4] ties together literary and judicial genres with a morphism wherein a legal actor performs in a professional role for an audience. This folds in a theaterical metaphor associated with Aristotle's judicial genre' where the actor persuade listeners & audience aiming for a particular decision. [5]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literary genre</span> Category of literary composition

A literary genre is a category of literature. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or length. They generally move from more abstract, encompassing classes, which are then further sub-divided into more concrete distinctions. The distinctions between genres and categories are flexible and loosely defined, and even the rules designating genres change over time and are fairly unstable.

Stephen Fain Williams was a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit until his death from complications of COVID-19 on August 7, 2020.

J. Harvie Wilkinson III American judge

James Harvie Wilkinson III is an American jurist who serves as a United States Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. His name has been raised at several junctures in the past as a possible nominee to the United States Supreme Court.

In law, a per curiam decision is a ruling issued by an appellate court of multiple judges in which the decision rendered is made by the court acting collectively. In contrast to regular opinions, a per curiam does not list the individual judge responsible for authoring the decision, but minority concurring and dissenting opinions are signed.

Danny Julian Boggs American judge

Danny Julián Boggs is an American attorney and a Senior United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was appointed to the court in 1986 and served as its Chief Judge from September 2003 to August 2009. Boggs was on the short list of President George W. Bush's candidates for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Diane S. Sykes American judge

Diane Schwerm Sykes is an American jurist and lawyer who serves as the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She served as a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1999 to 2004.

Alexander Mordecai Bickel (1924–1974) was an American legal scholar and expert on the United States Constitution. One of the most influential constitutional commentators of the twentieth century, his writings emphasize judicial restraint.

Jack Balkin American legal scholar

Jack M. Balkin is an American legal scholar. He is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Balkin is the founder and director of the Yale Information Society Project (ISP), a research center whose mission is "to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies for law and society." He also directs the Knight Law and Media Program and the Abrams Institute for Free Expression at Yale Law School.

Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court set forth the legal test for determining whether to grant deference to a government agency's interpretation of a statute which it administers. The decision articulated a doctrine now known as "Chevron deference". The doctrine consists of a two-part test applied by the court, when appropriate, that is highly deferential to government agencies: "whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction [emphasis added] of the statute", so long as Congress has not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerome Frank</span> American judge

Jerome New Frank was an American legal philosopher and author who played a leading role in the legal realism movement. He was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Genre criticism, a method within rhetorical criticism, analyzes texts in terms of their genre: the set of generic expectations, conventions, and constraints that guide their production and interpretation. In rhetoric, the theory of genre provides a means to classify and compare artifacts in terms of their formal, substantive and contextual features. By grouping artifacts with others which have similar formal features or rhetorical exigencies, rhetorical critics can shed light on how authors use or flout conventions for their own purposes. Genre criticism has thus become one of the main methodologies within rhetorical criticism.

Henry Billings Brown US Supreme Court justice from 1891 to 1906

Henry Billings Brown was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1891 to 1906.

Harry T. Edwards American judge

Harry Thomas Edwards, an American jurist and legal scholar, is currently a Senior United States Circuit Judge and chief judge emeritus of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C., and a professor of law at the New York University School of Law.

William Eskridge American legal scholar (born 1951)

William Nichol Eskridge Jr. is the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. He is one of the most cited law professors in America, ranking fourth overall for the period 2016–2020. He writes primarily on constitutional law, legislation and statutory interpretation, religion, marriage equality, and LGBT rights.

New legal realism (NLR) is an emerging school of thought in American legal philosophy.

Stephanos Bibas American judge

Stephanos Bibas is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Before his appointment to the bench, Bibas was a professor of law and criminology and director of the Supreme Court clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is a noted scholar of criminal procedure with expertise in criminal charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing. As a professor, Bibas examined how procedural rules written for jury trials have unintended consequences when cases involving jury trials are the exception, rather than the rule, with 95 percent of defendants pleading guilty. Bibas also studied the role of substantive goals such as remorse and apology in criminal procedure.

In law, an appeal is the process in which cases are reviewed by a higher authority, where parties request a formal change to an official decision. Appeals function both as a process for error correction as well as a process of clarifying and interpreting law. Although appellate courts have existed for thousands of years, common law countries did not incorporate an affirmative right to appeal into their jurisprudence until the 19th century.

Law and corpus linguistics (LCL) is a new academic sub-discipline that uses large databases of examples of language usage equipped with tools designed by linguists called corpora to better get at the meaning of words and phrases in legal texts. Thus, LCL is the application of corpus linguistic tools, theories, and methodologies to issues of legal interpretation in much the same way law and economics is the application of economic tools, theories, and methodologies to various legal issues.

Laura E. Little is an American legal scholar and author, specializing in conflict of laws, federal courts, humor and the law, the law of freedom of expression, and constitutional law. She is the James G. Schmidt Professor of Law at Temple University School of Law.

Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co., 455 U.S. 422, is a unanimous 1982 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that the petitioner was entitled to have his discrimination complaint adjudged by Illinois's Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which had dismissed it for its own failure to meet a deadline. The decision reversed the Illinois Supreme Court's holding to the contrary two years prior.

References

  1. Livermore, Michael A., Allen B. Riddell, and Daniel N. Rockmore. "The Supreme Court and the judicial genre." Ariz. L. Rev. 59 (2017): 837. https://www.ariddell.org/papers/livermore-rockmore-riddell-judical-genre-59arizlrev837.pdf
  2. Ferguson, Robert A. "The judicial opinion as literary genre." Yale JL & Human. 2 (1990): 201. https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/7408/20_2YaleJL_Human201_1990_.pdf?sequence=2
  3. McKeown, Jamie. "A comparative investigation of metadiscursive clarifying devices in the abortion discourse of the US Supreme Court." Discourse & Communication (2022): 17504813221108827. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/17504813221108827
  4. Xifaras, Mikhail. "The Theory of Legal Characters." U. Colo. L. Rev. 92 (2021): 1189. https://lawreview.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/21.-Xifaras.pdf
  5. Aristotle A Kennedy GA. On Rhetoric : A Theory of Civic Discourse. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press; 2007.