Legal writing: attitude and emphasis

Abstract

The degree to which the language of emotion finds expression in legal opinions is a matter of increasing interest. This chapter focuses on jurists’ expressions of attitude and emphasis by the use of selected adverbs and adverbials at two time periods a decade apart in California and U.S. supreme court opinions. It compares jurists’ use with frequencies in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and its Academic subcorpus. Generally speaking, attitudinal and emphatic adverbials appear more frequently in U.S. state and federal supreme court opinions than in general American English or in Academic writing. Despite the condemnation of emphatics like plainly and clearly in legal writing handbooks, supreme court opinions show little or no discernible effect. Given a general understanding of supreme court justices as dispassionate appliers of law to a set of facts, their surprisingly frequent deployment of attitudinal and emphatic adverbs shows that in fact they often express strong feelings about the issues and the legal interpretations and decisions of their fellow jurists.