tform from which to examine the effectiveness of abortion-argumentation theories in accounting for the provenance, shape, and content of political argument for two reasons. First, the amicus brief originates with partial or partisan advocacy convictions that can be presumed to be deeply held and inform the pattern of ideas emerging in a brief. Second, well-established standards and practices of the American judiciary impose specific and programmatic guidelines on the linguistic and organizational form of an amicus brief. Therefore the means by which a legal argumentation is articulated or the strategies for which it is employed may be a useful marker for sighting the scope and limit of rhetorical analyses of the abortion debate and of the judicial response to that debate.
We begin with the rhetoric of the court itself, which appears to owe something to extra-legal as well as legalistic discourse. Hagan looks at the language of the Roe v. Wade decision with an eye on the justices' selection of arguments or segments of arguments that tend to "severally cooper
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