Abstract
So much is known about SCOTUS oral hearings, so little is known about SCC oral hearings. Why? The answer at least partly turns on the availability of evidence: Americans have ready access to transcripts of Supreme Court hearings and Canadians do not. This project addresses that challenge by introducing an artificial intelligence-based approach to transcribe the SCC’s 2021-2022 oral arguments, enabling detailed empirical analyses of some of the speaking patterns of justices. To demonstrate potential research avenues, it explores two questions: which judges speak the most and which of the two offıcial languages do they speak? The research here shows that there are major qualitative gendered differences: judges who are men speak much more in Court than judges who are women. Similarly, there is a significant language difference: judges not from Quebec rarely spoke French in oral hearings.
Citation Information
Wallace, Simon.
"Speaking Like a Judge: Using Artificial Intelligence to Empirically Assess JudicialSpeech in Supreme Court of Canada Hearings by Language Spoken and Gender of the Speaker."
The Supreme Court Law Review: Osgoode’s Annual Constitutional Cases Conference
115.
(2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60082/2563-8505.1456
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/sclr/vol115/iss1/14
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.