Televised Oral Arguments and Judicial Legitimacy: An Initial Assessment

Black, Ryan C.; Johnson, Timothy R.; Owens, Ryan J.; Wedeking, Justin

doi:10.1007/s11109-022-09848-5

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 52 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Therefore, I encourage future scholars to analyze multiple aspects of both verbal and nonverbal communication. Perhaps the most promising angles are gestures at state supreme court oral arguments where video recording is allowed (e.g., Black et al 2023). It is likely that female attorneys may navigate the double bind by pairing female nonverbal communication with masculine verbal communication (e.g., Carpinella and Bauer 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

Gleason

2024

Social Science Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ObjectiveAt U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments, female attorneys are more likely to be interrupted than their male counterparts under some conditions. This makes it difficult for women to effectively construct a narrative and substantively impact case law. While existing work conceptualizes gender as a binary, I draw on recent work stressing gender is performative to deesentialize gender and explore how attorneys’ compliance with gender norms and subtle expectations about men's and women's behavior in a host of contexts, predicts interruptions at oral arguments.MethodsVia quantitative textual analysis of all oral arguments from 2004 to 2019 where one attorney argues for the petitioner and one for the respondent, I examine the extent to which gender norm compliance predicts interruptions.ResultsI find both male and female attorneys are interrupted more frequently when their oral arguments are not gender normative. Thus, an argument that is successful for a male attorney is not necessarily successful for a female attorney, and vice versa.ConclusionMy results underscore female attorneys are not less successful as a matter of course; attorney success is driven by attorney compliance with gender norms. This work also raises a number of normative questions I encourage future scholars to explore.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

Gleason

2024

Social Science Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Because the Court bans cameras, it is difficult to impossible to explore most forms of nonverbal communication there. However, cameras were a mainstay at several courts before the pandemic (e.g., Black et al 2023), and many utilized Zoom during COVID-19 (Bergeron 2021). In tandem with recent innovations in video processing allowing for frame-by-frame analysis of facial expressions (Boussalis et al 2021) and postures (Everitt, Best, and Gaudet 2016;Neumann, Fowler, and Ridout 2022), scholars should examine how nonverbal gender norms impact outcomes across multiple courts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

I Can’t See You; Can You Hear Me? Gender Norms and Context During In-Person and Teleconference U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Gleason

2023

Pol & Gen

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Female attorneys at the U.S. Supreme Court are less successful than male attorneys under some conditions because of gender norms, implicit expectations about how men and women should act. While previous work has found that women are more successful when they use more emotional language at oral arguments, gender norms are context sensitive. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted perhaps the most radical contextual shift in Supreme Court history: freewheeling in-person arguments were replaced with turn-based teleconference arguments. This change altered judicial decision-making and, I argue, justices’ assessments of attorneys’ gender performance. Using quantitative textual analysis of oral arguments, I demonstrate that justices implicitly evaluate gender performance with different metrics in each modality. Gender-normative levels of emotional language predict success in both formats. Function words, however, only predict success in teleconference arguments. Given gender’s salience at the Supreme Court and in broader society, my findings prompt questions about the extent to which women can substantively impact case law.

show abstract

Public Opinion and Legitimacy

Smyth

2024

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behaviour

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This chapter provides an overview of the current state of the literature on public opinion and legitimacy of the courts. It begins by outlining the competing theoretical perspectives and giving an overview of the state of the empirical literature for different courts and countries. It then proceeds to examine the main data and methodological issues that have occupied the literature, outlines the main findings, and provides a discussion of the challenges facing the literature. A major theme that emerges is that the competing theoretical perspectives have produced conflicting results, leaving the literature in a state of flux on key issues such as the stability of legitimacy over time, the importance of policy disagreement, and the relationship between diffuse and specific support. The chapter concludes by mapping a potential path forward with a plea for researchers on both sides of the theoretical divide to iron out their methodological differences, including agreeing on an appropriate measure of legitimacy that can inform future research.

show abstract

Televised Oral Arguments and Judicial Legitimacy: An Initial Assessment

Cited by 3 publications

References 52 publications

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

Since you put it that way… Gender norms and interruptions at Supreme Court oral arguments

I Can’t See You; Can You Hear Me? Gender Norms and Context During In-Person and Teleconference U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Public Opinion and Legitimacy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About