“And I do think you have to give a kind of yes or no answer to that question”: Supportive alignment in US Supreme Court oral arguments

Abstract Though the US Supreme Court is famous for ideological disagreements among its Justices, agreement may in fact be the norm: most appeals are not politically salient, unanimous rulings are common, and even divided rulings require at least five Justices to agree. Because nearly all speaking turns of Justices in oral arguments are in the form of questions to an attorney, any linguistic evidence of agreement would have to be in the ways that these questions are asked. In this study, I review an oral argument for evidence of agreement, with a focus on supportive alignment, that is, when one party ratifies or approves of another’s conversation turn. I analyze two questions from Justices that were later repeated and endorsed by other Justices, and I argue that these reuses are a form of supportive alignment driven by the unique interactional constraints of the setting. (Institutional discourse, legal discourse, US Supreme Court, multiparty interaction, alignment)