Supreme Court Case Analysis

By Matthew Nelson

      The official style is ever present in the scholarly literature that we have become accustomed to reading and writing for college or for our professional lives.  Some areas of literature have come to expect a higher degree of intensity from the official style than others.  The official style is a key aspect of writing in professional settings because it helps generate credibility and authority through linguistic manipulation and diction.  The legal community for example, is often more official in the texts that are produced than writing areas where less intensive diction is acceptable and does not detract from the credibility of the literature itself.  US v. Lopez is a Supreme Court case analysis I wrote to examine the positions of both the dissent and majority and then align myself with the side that I felt best represented the intentions of the Constitution.  In this case review I used an extensive degree of official strategies for the same reasons that the official style is so prevalent in education and professional settings, because it made me appear more credible than if I were to explain all the same points I made in a way that everyone could understand.

          In the case review, as I had mentioned, I use a number of the official style strategies that one would expect from a document pertaining to the legal formalities of constitutional law.  Below is an excerpt from the case review that I fell best represents the overall diction and style used in the paper.

“It is my position that in this case the majority was correct in their interpretation of the Constitution and in particular the Interstate Commerce Clause.  While the dissent did make a logical argument about the connection between education and interstate commerce and the relationship between firearms and education, far too much speculation was involved in their reasoning.  Had there been empirical evidence in United States v. Lopez to conclude that by bringing a gun to class Alfonso Lopez had substantially affected the education of his peers and that in turn damaged the economy of the area there may have been a case to be made.  As it stood however, I feel the majority made the correct decision.  One particular area that I felt to be especially compelling was the discussion about the possibility of the substantial effects doctrine to get out of hand.  I agreed wholeheartedly with Justice Thomas that such a liberally interpreted doctrine when compounded with the aggregation principle could enable Congress to significantly impose on state legislative jurisdictions and violate the principle of federalism.”

From reading this it is fairly easy to discern that I was writing with the intention of implementing official style strategies, or at least attempting to.  To kick off the excerpt, for example, I began with the strategy ‘slow sentence opening.’  At the time I was far less familiar with the nuances of the official style than I am currently, so the implementation of this strategy was likely an attempt to extend my paper to fit a page requirement.  The page requirement itself though is a way of encouraging the use of official strategies like that in practice.  Another official style strategy that I had found myself using to a high degree in this case review was the complex sentence structure strategy.  The example from the text that stood out was the single sentence “In accordance with the parameters set for Congress as they saw them the majority was able to rule the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 as unconstitutional and reserved that right for the states.”  It would have been perfectly acceptable to substitute that entire phrase for one that simply stated that Congress felt the Act was a decision for the states to make, but that would not have captured the essence of the official style and the inherent credibility we associate with it in quite the same way.  This quotation provides a not entirely uncommon example of my writing incorporating more than one official style strategy in one sentence.  In the case the other strategy, alongside the complex sentence strategy, is the verbose/bureaucratic strategy where a sentence drones on and is accomplished using more words than are necessary or efficient to convey the information.  Just like the complex sentence strategy this could have been to elongate my writing and for the purposes of the assignment’s guidelines, but I also believe that it gave me an opportunity to include a level of diction and verbiage that allowed me to present the information in a format that would, to anyone familiar with the topic, appear more credible and trustworthy.

          While I have explored the unnecessary nature much of my writing has, I think that it also helps to answer the question of the significance of this style as well and it pertains to the motive behind why I wrote this text and the purpose of the verbiage involved.  While it can appear tedious it helped me accomplish the goal of the case review itself, which is not only to explain my position on the case US v. Lopez, but also to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the source material. 

By reflecting much of the language used in the actual Supreme Court position, which was written in perhaps the most tedious and complicated official style I have ever encountered, I was able to inexplicitly convey to my professor that I had a comprehensive grasp of not only the case, but also constitutional precedent as it applied to the case.  While the official style is a powerful tool in specific settings, the exclusivity of it to the niche communities that it is tailored for can make it seem almost like a foreign language to people that are not privy to the jargon or stylistic cues that are uniquely developed in the official styles of specific professional communities.