The Strategic Use of Constitutional Interpretation Methods by the Supreme Court

• In Event: Reconsidering Justice Preferences and Goals on the US Supreme Court

Abstract

Why do Supreme Court justices proselytize methods of Constitutional interpretation when they rarely use them? The usage and impact of methods of Constitutional interpretation motivate this project. I argue that the Supreme Court uses methods of Constitutional interpretation as a tool to mask ideological decision-making and garner legitimacy. I test this by developing a text-data classification method to categorize Supreme Court opinions by interpretation method. Using a supervised machine learning model, I classify all Supreme Court opinions from 2000-2023 that use originalist and/or textualist language. I then use these classifications to test whether the Court uses interpretation methods strategically by examining when and why opinion authors decide to include originalist and/or textualist language in their opinions. The results shed light on the under-studied area of the strategic use of Constitutional interpretation methods. This paper additionally contributes to the development of new methodologies for studying Supreme Court opinion writing and creates a metric for Constitutional interpretation methods that may be used in future analyses.

Author

• Madeline Mader, University of Colorado Boulder