Rhetoric and Discourse in Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Abstract

1. A Letter to the Chief Justice of the United States 2. Historical Development of Legal Rhetoric and Supreme Court Oral Arguments 3. Do Oral Arguments before the Supreme Court Matter? A Simple Explanation 4. New Question: Oral Arguments Matter, But How Do We Make Sense of Them? A Modest Proposal 5. Critical Theories and Research Questions: Proposing a Method to Capture the Madness of Oral Arguments 6. The Many Faces of Oral Argument: Oral Argument's Purposes and the Justices' Styles 7. Arguing about Bong Hits 4 Jesus' Testing Theory and Method in Morse v. Frederick 8. Making Sense of Child Rapists in Kennedy v. Louisiana: A Firsthand Observation 9. Historical Repercussions of Judicial Sensemaking: District of Columbia v. Dick Anthony Heller 10. The Ground Covered and New Ground to Uncover: Responding to Critics, Offering Recommendations, and a Final Letter to the Chief Justice 11. Biased Sensemaking: Compromising the Court's Rhetorical Authority