Abstract

While much of the work on amicus briefs focuses on whether such briefs affect Supreme Court outcomes or doctrine, much less is known about the content of these briefs, particularly how groups opt to frame issues as part of their litigation strategy. In this study, I leverage an approach to content analysis that has previously been used to analyze judicial opinions and use it to assess the frames used by amicus groups in a single policy area over four decades. Using an original dataset of amicus briefs filed in Supreme Court cases on the right to abortion, I test the claim from the social movement literature that antiabortion groups have adopted the language of science in the post-Roe era. However, I find only limited support for such a shift, suggesting that litigation strategies may not track framing approaches used in other venues. Among antiabortion amici, only health organizations rely upon science framing, partially neutralizing the monopoly that prochoice health organizations had established with respect to scientific claims. By comparison, prochoice groups generally employ more science framing in their briefs than prolife groups and show evidence of calibrating this frame in response to changes in doctrine and court composition. Beyond its contributions to illuminating the movement-countermovement dynamics in abortion litigation, this study offers an approach that could be easily adapted to the study of other policy areas, contributes to the literature on social movements and framing, and advances our understanding of how organized interests assert themselves through the amicus curiae brief.

摘要

虽然关于法庭之友简报的大部分工作都集中在此类简报是否会影响最高法院的结果或原则，但对这些简报的内容知之甚少，尤其是团体如何选择将问题作为其诉讼策略的一部分。在这项研究中，我利用了一种以前用于分析司法意见的内容分析方法，并用它来评估 40 年来法庭之友团体在单一政策领域使用的框架。使用在最高法院关于堕胎权的案件中提交的法庭之友简报的原始数据集，我检验了社会运动文献中关于反堕胎团体在后罗伊案中采用了科学语言的说法。时代。然而，我发现对这种转变的支持有限，这表明诉讼策略可能无法跟踪其他场所使用的框架方法。在反堕胎之友中，只有卫生组织依赖科学框架，部分抵消了 prochoice 卫生组织在科学声明方面建立的垄断。相比之下，prochoice 组通常在其简报中使用比 prolife 组更多的科学框架，并显示出校准该框架以响应教义和法院组成的变化的证据。除了有助于阐明堕胎诉讼中的运动反运动动态之外，本研究还提供了一种方法，可以很容易地适应其他政策领域的研究，有助于社会运动和框架的文献，