Document Type

Campus Access Essay

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

Underlying scholarly interest in opinion writing at different levels of the federal judiciary is the premise that judges and justices are selective with the language they use based on the audiences they reach and a case’s salience. Intuitively, judges and justices reach both an internal audience, characterized by their colleagues and members of the legal community, and an external audience, namely the media and general public. The language that judges use to communicate with these two audiences differs. In this study of judicial decision making at the United States Supreme Court, I analyze Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s use of emotive language in her authored dissenting opinions (1994-2020), using quantitative textual language analysis to examine the emotional tone of her writing in those opinions before and after she was famously anointed as the “Notorious R.B.G.” in 2013 in addition to how several other variables related to case salience and ideology affect emotive language. I conclude that though Ginsburg’s use of emotive language did not change across her tenure, her dissenting opinions for salient cases and those that are ideologically liberal used significantly stronger emotive language. This research offers a novel window into Ginsburg’s tenure, decision-making, and offers several avenues of future study related to judicial behavior and court dynamics as told by the language justices use in their authored opinions.

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