ABSTRACT
The US common law system relies heavily on the written opinions of appellate courts, and it is from such opinions more than statutory law that American jurisprudence is learned. Particularly in the first of the three years required to complete a doctor of laws degree, opinions rendered by appellate court judges are the principal focus of attention in law school classrooms in the United States (Mertz 2007). Writing about legal decision-making and the presentation of legal opinions, Solan
(1993: 1) observes that “Any judge who takes himself and his position seriously struggles with these dual tasks.” Having clerked for an associate justice of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, he adds that “judges usually care deeply about making the best decision they can, and about conveying their decision in a manner that makes the decision appear as fair as possible to the parties, and often to the public.” Once judges have made a decision about a case, however, they do not typically report the anguish that went into making it. Says Solan: “Any lawyer who has been on the losing side of a close question will recall the shock of reading how easily the judge rejects the losing arguments out of hand, as if they could not have been made by a thinking person” (1993: 2). As we shall see with respect to split decisions made by supreme court justices, “any lawyer” could readily encompass justices on both sides of the decision. Conley and O’Barr (2005: 129) stress the point that “the details of legal discourse
matter because language is the essential mechanism through which the power of the law is realized, exercised, reproduced, and occasionally challenged and subverted.” The present chapter focuses on small details of legal language in a legal register that has received relatively little attention from forensic linguists but which is crucially important in the training of attorneys in the United States. In particular, it examines adverbial expressions of attitude and emphasis in decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States and, as a state example, the Supreme Court of California. The opinions rendered by these courts are drafted as written documents intended to be published in
written form. Because they are usually not read aloud by the justices, but prepared for publication, they are not drafted as oral documents.
