Justices and Attorneys as Discourse Communities: Using Ethnographic Procedures to Analyze Conversational Dynamics during Supreme Court Oral Arguments
Oral arguments in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) are a specialized and complex dialogue between justices and lawyers, and represent a key moment in the American judicial process. Like any verbal interaction, these debates are constructed collectively by their participants – in terms...
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| Publicado no: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/asp, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicado em: |
ASp
2026
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| Assuntos: | |
| Acesso em linha: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Resumo: | Oral arguments in the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) are a specialized and complex dialogue between justices and lawyers, and represent a key moment in the American judicial process. Like any verbal interaction, these debates are constructed collectively by their participants – in terms of content and interpersonal relationships – according to modalities and discursive strategies that evolve as the conversation unfolds. To account for these mechanisms in linguistic terms, studying transcripts of interactions at SCOTUS is not enough; researchers must supplement this approach by immersing themselves in the specialized domain and its discourse communities to comprehend all its dimensions, notably through interviews with practitioners. The ethnographic approach, although increasingly common in ESP, is rare in legal English studies. In this article, I therefore report on how interviews conducted with Supreme Court Bar attorneys enabled me to refine my understanding of the specialized discourse communities of SCOTUS and to provide a more in-depth analysis of the discursive mechanisms at play during oral arguments. |
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