How Apex Courts Affect the Way Judges Talk

Talk by Michael Livermore, 2023-2024 Paris IAS Fellow, at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.

Closed to the public.

Presentation

Changes in formal legal rules announced by courts are only one mechanism through which the law dynamically responds to its economic, political, social and cultural milieu. The subject matter of the law also shifts, as new technologies or social relations give rise to entirely different classes of legal disputes. More subtle are variations over time in how judges discuss the facts and the law in the cases before them. Such discursive shifts affect the framing and analysis of legal questions within broader subject matter categories This talk discusses a quantitative study that examines the role of the US Supreme Court in influencing the direction of legal discourse in the federal courts.