ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by expanding the scope of prudential argumentation to include the collaborative inventional process, describing an example of prudential opinion-writing as a model for prudential legal argument, and then applying the framework to Roberts’ decision. The balancing strategies of prudential argumentation serve the legal situation well, especially because its temporal orientation mirrors appellate court questions that demand “knowledge of the past, understanding of the present, and a sense of the future”. The chapter shows that within appellate legal discourse, prudential argumentation strategies begin with the collaborative inventional process through which justices craft their arguments. Powell’s donated collection of papers provided a unique view into Supreme Court opinion-writing process in a publically controversial and jurisprudentially divided case. Powell used the idiom of accommodation to validate the principle of individual rights that opponents of the program argued, while evoking the idiom of audacity to pair the value of diversity with a legal story of limits that deferred judgment to universities.
