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Pamela Hobbs

Extraterritoriality and extralegality: The United States Supreme Court and Guantánamo Bay

Keywords: United States Supreme Court, constitutional law, rhetorical structure, critical discourse analysis

Although the United States Supreme Court plays a pivotal role in American government and American law, its opinions have seldom been the subject of linguistic analysis. Yet these opinions provide fertile ground for sociolinguistic and discourse analytic research. The American common-law system, with its rich rhetorical tradition of adversarial argumentation and judgemade precedents, furnishes the context in which the Court's decision-making takes place; however, the discursive processes by which the Court's opinions are structured have rarely been examined. This paper presents an analysis of Rasul v. Bush, in which foreign nationals detained as ‘enemy combatants’ at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, challenged the legality of their detention. By examining the parties' development of competing characterizations of the relevant events, I explore the role of adversarial argumentation in legal decision-making. By tracing the manner in which the Court draws upon these characterizations while framing its decision as grounded in existing law, I present an analysis of the intertextual processes of text construction by which the Court produces its decision as an authoritative legal text that both maintains and transforms existing law.

Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0165-4888
Volume: 27, 03/2007
Pages: 171 - 200

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