| Merits briefs are litigating parties' main means to convey their construction of their cases in court. In the Supreme Court, they provide the Justices with consolidated arguments and assessments of each case. In doing so they are considered one of the most important inputs for the Justices' opinions and specifically for opinion language. While anecdotal evidence supports this point, minimal empirical scholarship is devoted to verifying this premise. This dissertation is designed to look expansively at the relationship between Supreme Court merits briefs and opinions and in so doing it is designed to fill empirical gaps in our understanding of the inputs into Supreme Court opinions. It also looks specifically at the instances where merits briefs played the largest role in defining the Court's opinion language. It is equally designed to broaden the understanding of the relationship between briefs and opinions with the addition of new indicators, variables, and data, and by clarifying the mechanisms involved in the process linking briefs and opinions. This dissertation is broken into three parts based on interrelated analytic goals: examining the relative impact of merits briefs on opinion language, looking at the factors and mechanisms that are involved in this relationship, and examining cases where merits briefs have the largest impact on Supreme Court opinion language. This dissertation uses an original, large-N dataset of over 9,000 briefs and their respective opinions to test hypotheses regarding factors that make merits briefs more or less impactful on the Court's opinions. |
