ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the digital media representations of the 2019 UK Supreme Court’s ruling that declared Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspension of Parliament to be unlawful. Using framing analysis supported by corpus-assisted discourse analysis, it explores how this ruling, and presiding Supreme Court judge, Baroness Hale, were woven into public debates concerning Brexit and democracy. Digital comments on the events were subsumed into populist anti-establishment frames, and the judges themselves were discredited through symbolic representations as “conspiratorial”, “unpatriotic”, and “treacherous”, with particular misogynist undertones evoked through references to witchcraft and the supernatural used in the context of Baroness Hale herself.
