The public addresses of Meese and Brennan: Voices in the American legal wilderness

Abstract

This essay provides a close textual examination of the historic debates that took place in the mid‐1980s between former Attorney General Edwin Meese and former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. These debates offered listeners contrasting positions on such politically and socially divisive issues as affirmative action, habeas corpus review, abortion, and reproductive rights. This essay utilizes some of the tools of genre criticism to explicate and defend the claim that the constitutional arguments advanced in the speeches of Meese and Brennan were presented in the form of “jeremiads” that had the potential to restrict or expand the range of policy alternatives available in coping with complex jurisprudence problems. The overarching goal of this essay is to improve our understanding of legal rhetoric in general and the judicial jeremiad in particular.