Legal and Political Stance Detection of SCOTUS Language

We analyze publicly available US Supreme Court documents using automated stance detection. In the first phase of our work, we investigate the extent to which the Court's public-facing language is political. We propose and calculate two distinct ideology metrics of SCOTUS justices using oral argument transcripts. We then compare these language-based metrics to existing social scientific measures of the ideology of the Supreme Court and the public. Through this cross-disciplinary analysis, we find that justices who are more responsive to public opinion tend to express their ideology during oral arguments. This observation provides a new kind of evidence in favor of the attitudinal change hypothesis of Supreme Court justice behavior. As a natural extension of this political stance detection, we propose the more specialized task of legal stance detection with our new dataset SC-stance, which matches written opinions to legal questions. We find competitive performance on this dataset using language adapters trained on legal documents.Comment: Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop at EMNLP 202

The relationship between the American public and demographics on the Supreme Court: an investigation of “The Harvard- Yale-ification of the Supreme Court.”

There are currently only two law schools represented on the Supreme Court: Harvard and Yale. This research looks to examine this recent narrowing of educational and professional backgrounds on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Specifically, this paper looks to examine the influence the public has on Supreme Court nominations and the intricacies of public opinion surrounding potential judicial nominees. This is done by drawing from both literature reviewing the influences on Supreme Court nominations and through conducting a public opinion survey on related topics. Through analyzing this prior research and the survey results together it becomes clear that while it is problematic that there are only two law schools represented on the Supreme Court, the public has mixed views on this relative narrowing in diversity

Public Opinion, Cultural Change, and Constitutional Adjudication

When do courts pay attention to public opinion in deciding constitutional issues? When should courts do so? This Article provides a limited answer to those questions. Courts often pay attention to public opinion when deciding constitutional issues, especially when the issue is one that involves a challenge to a long-standing cultural norm. That pattern is present, for example, in each of Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. The Court changed its view of equal protection because public opinion about racial segregation changed. Today, the long-standing cultural understanding of marriage is challenged by those who claim that its perpetuation violates the equal protection and due process guarantees. While nobody can predict with any certainty what the judicial resolution of this issue may be, it should not be surprising if that resolution reflects public opinion on the matter. Public opinion data on issues of special concern to the homosexual community suggests that each of the legislative and judicial responses at the state level reflects public opinion or, if anything, lags a bit behind. But the courts catch up, and it is appropriate for courts to consider public opinion when weighing constitutional challenges to deeply embedded and long-accepted cultural practices