Dissenting with conviction: boosting in challenging the majority opinion

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the role of metadiscourse in the realization of judges’ persuasive strategies in challenging the reasoning of the majority opinion. In particular, the article describes how dissenting judges exploit the boosting features to produce convincing arguments and control the power relationship with an audience. The findings are based on a linguistic analysis of 27 judicial dissents by judges of the Russian Constitutional Court. As regards the choice of boosting devices to be searched in the corpus, the present work adopts Hyland et al.’s (2021) taxonomy of boosters. The study shows that Russian judges make extensive use of boosters to show disagreement and challenge the majority opinion. The results have implications for our understanding of judicial dissenting as a legal genre which has been understudied in the literature, and for teaching legal writing to law students. I suggest that judge’s competence in presenting arguments includes a developed knowledge of metadiscourse.