Communicating Dissent in Judicial Opinions: A Comparative, Genre-Based Analysis

Abstract

To date, there has been surprisingly little research on separate opinions in legal linguistics literature. Scarce attention has been paid to the linguistic and communicative aspects of how judges frame their disagreements. This paper serves as one of the early attempts to examine the institution of votum separatum, or separate opinion, from a comparative, cross-language perspective using a linguistic methodology. The evidence indicates a clear similarity in terms of how separate opinions are integrated within the respective macrostructures of the US SC opinions and the Constitutional Tribunal judgments. This study demonstrates how judges tend to employ highly formulaic expressions to signal their disagreement despite the absence of clear guidelines to communicate such stances. The analysis of their frequent phraseology demonstrates that declaring votum separatum and providing its justification are two different acts, not only legally but also linguistically, especially in terms of their formulaicity. The Polish and American justifications differ in the degree to which the frequent phraseology reveals peculiarities of judicial argumentation in addition to the presence of strong evaluative concerns.

A comparative investigation of metadiscursive clarifying devices in the abortion discourse of the U.S. Supreme Court

“…I collected data from two open domain sources: the Cornell Legal Information Institute (as in Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2020), and FindLaw.Com (as in Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2017). I collected 40 post-Roe and Doe SCOTUS opinions concerning abortion (217,685 words in total).…”

“…Firstly, as already stated, just a few studies have examined separate opinions. For example, Goźdź-Roszkowski (2020) comparatively examines dissents in Poland’s supreme judicial body and SCOTUS. McKeown (2021) examines SCOTUS majority and dissent opinions.…”

“…Sometimes these separate opinions can come to represent the law as when SCOTUS overrules itself or congress legislates on the issue. Goźdź-Roszkowski (2020: 383) notes that analysts of legal discourse have largely overlooked the phenomenon of separate judicial opinions, thus warranting investigation of these discrete forms. In this study, I will examine four types of SCOTUS opinion: majority opinions, regular concurrences, special concurrences, and dissents (see next section for explanation).…”

Translating genres, creating transgenres: Textual 'betweens' as situation-based systemic innovations

“…Some authors have even suggested that specific genres may be assigned specific translation strategies for specific language pairs (Arntz 1988: 468), although no conclusive results have been produced in this sense (see Mayoral Asensio 2002 for a critique of this point). Substantial research efforts have been devoted to finding the key elements that distinguish one genre from another as a basis for classification (Emery 1991, Goźdź-Roszkowski 2020, House 1977, Reiß 1982, Sandig 1972, Schmidt 1993, Wilss & Thome 1984. Descriptions of genres relevant to translation have mainly focused on specialized domains and provided substantial data to increase our knowledge of discourse across languages and cultures (among many others, Moreno-Pérez 2020; Orts 2015; Pontrandolfo 2014).…”

The Purpose and the Functions of the Institute of Dissenting Opinion of Judge in the Constitutional Proceeding

“…Несмотря на это, спустя 20 лет, этот пробел так и не был устранен в федеральном законе, о чем в своем мнении указывает судья Н.С. Бондарь 14 Судья Г.А. Гаджиев 18 очень подробно и последовательно изложил свою позицию в понимании принципа «in dubio contra fi scum» (сомнение против фиска), а также когда и при каких условиях должен применяться пункт 7 статьи 3 Налогового Кодекса РФ.…”