Comparing Constitutional and Unconstitutional Opinions on Affirmative Action: A Corpus-Based Study of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

In response to the recent reversal of affirmative action in the United States, this study conducts a corpus-based analysis of keywords and epistemic adjectives used in opposing sides of the related legal debate. Eleven US Supreme Court decisions on this topic were analyzed to construct two corpora: one representing constitutional opinions, and the other, unconstitutional opinions. First, a twofold keyword analysis was conducted, comparing these corpora against the Open American National Corpus, and then against each other as reference corpora. The findings reveal that both sides of the debate rely on keywords that reflect their respective values and rationales. Second, both corpora were annotated to enable a concordance search for evaluative ‘that’ clauses controlled by certainty adjectives. The results show that epistemic adjectives were used more frequently in the unconstitutional opinions corpus, and appeared more often in the affirmative action discourse as a whole, compared to SCOTUS, a general corpus of US Supreme Court decisions. Also, majority opinions, regardless of whether they found affirmative action constitutional or unconstitutional, employed a higher proportion of these adjectives than minority opinions. Overall, the findings indicate that the keywords in legal documents reflect how opposing justices view affirmative action, and that epistemic adjectives serve as part of a broader legal writing strategy to construct persuasive arguments. This study demonstrates how controversial legal themes can be effectively analyzed through the lens of corpus linguistics.