Abstract
We analyze publicly available US Supreme Court documents using automated stance detection. In the first phase of our work, we investigate the extent to which the Court’s public-facing language is political. We propose and calculate two distinct ideology metrics of SCOTUS justices using oral argument transcripts. We then compare these language-based metrics to existing social scientific measures of the ideology of the Supreme Court and the public. Through this cross-disciplinary analysis, we find that justices who are more responsive to public opinion tend to express their ideology during oral arguments. This observation provides a new kind of evidence in favor of the attitudinal change hypothesis of Supreme Court justice behavior. As a natural extension of this political stance detection, we propose the more specialized task of legal stance detection with our new dataset SC-stance, which matches written opinions to legal questions. We find competitive performance on this dataset using language adapters trained on legal documents.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.nllp-1.25
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
- Editors:
- Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro
- Venue:
- NLLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 265–275
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.25
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.25
- Cite (ACL):
- Noah Bergam, Emily Allaway, and Kathleen Mckeown. 2022. Legal and Political Stance Detection of SCOTUS Language. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022, pages 265–275, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Legal and Political Stance Detection of SCOTUS Language (Bergam et al., NLLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.nllp-1.25.pdf