Shifting Grounds: Metaphors and Their Role in the Supreme Court’s Reasoning on Abortion

• In Event: 50212 - Legitimacy, Punishment, and Language Dynamics in the Law

Abstract

This project examines how metaphors in U.S. Supreme Court abortion opinions shape legal reasoning and reflect broader societal narratives. Drawing from cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis, it investigates how metaphor use in judicial decisions both mirrors and potentially drives ideological shifts, contributing to the polarization of public discourse on abortion.

Using a mixed-methods approach, I qualitatively code 51 Supreme Court opinions from 1965 to 2024, tracking shifts in judicial language and reasoning over time. These patterns are contextualized through justices’ memoirs, speeches, and correspondences, offering insight into the personal and societal influences shaping their rhetorical strategies. To scale the analysis, I integrate FrameBERT, a machine-learning tool trained on manually coded opinions and other justice writings, enabling automated metaphor detection across the corpus. This triangulation of qualitative coding, historical context, and computational modeling reveals evolving patterns in metaphor use and their entanglement with ideological change.

By mapping how language institutionalizes ideology within the judiciary, this project provides a novel framework for studying the sociocultural dynamics of legal reasoning and its influence on public discourse.

Author

• Kelly Shea Jones, UC San Diego