Heard or Halted? Gender, Interruptions, and Emotional Tone in U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments

TL;DR

This study investigates how interruptions during U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments influence the semantic content and emotional tone of advocates' speech, revealing gendered differences in emotional valence but not in argumentative content.

Contribution

It introduces a computational linguistic approach to analyze the impact of interruptions on discourse and gender dynamics in high-stakes judicial settings.

Findings

Interruptions do not significantly change argumentative content.

Interruptions toward female advocates have more negative emotional tone.

Semantic similarity remains high before and after interruptions.

Abstract

This study examines how interruptions during U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments shape both the semantic content and emotional tone of advocates' speech, with a focus on gendered dynamics in judicial discourse. Using the ConvoKit Supreme Court Corpus (2010-2019), we analyze 12,663 speech chunks from advocate-justice interactions to assess whether interruptions alter the meaning of an advocate's argument and whether interruptions toward female advocates exhibit more negative emotional valence. Semantic shifts are quantified using GloVe-based sentence embeddings, while sentiment is measured through lexicon-based analysis. We find that semantic similarity between pre- and post-interruption speech remains consistently high, suggesting that interruptions do not substantially alter argumentative content. However, interruptions directed at female advocates contain significantly higher levels of negative sentiment. These results deepen empirical understanding of gendered communication in elite institutional settings and demonstrate the value of computational linguistic methods for studying power, discourse, and equity in judicial proceedings.