Dr. M Kelly Carr

Contemporary American town hall meetings are steeped in the Athenian notion of civic engagement as a hallmark of deliberative democracy. New media offer unprecedented interactivity and can enhance democratic dialogue. Deluca and Peeples assert that the face-to-face conception of public sphere limits our understanding about what constitutes political activity and citizenship. Constituents in both parties have reported a noticeable decline in town hall meetings and an increased secrecy about the time and locations of events that legislators hold. Avoidance tactics include releasing meeting announcements at the last minute, scheduling small rooms and inconvenient times, prohibiting signs bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, and holding Facebook and tele-town halls screened by operators. In exchange for appearing before them and listening, members cultivate the persuasive tool of ethos, building trust in order to ask for their voting support. New technologies now allow members connectivity without the uncertainty and hassle of face-to-face meetings.

This chapter begins by expanding the scope of prudential argumentation to include the collaborative inventional process, describing an example of prudential opinion-writing as a model for prudential legal argument, and then applying the framework to Roberts' decision. The balancing strategies of prudential argumentation serve the legal situation well, especially because its temporal orientation mirrors appellate court questions that demand "knowledge of the past, understanding of the present, and a sense of the future". The chapter shows that within appellate legal discourse, prudential argumentation strategies begin with the collaborative inventional process through which justices craft their arguments. Powell's donated collection of papers provided a unique view into Supreme Court opinion-writing process in a publically controversial and jurisprudentially divided case. Powell used the idiom of accommodation to validate the principle of individual rights that opponents of the program argued, while evoking the idiom of audacity to pair the value of diversity with a legal story of limits that deferred judgment to universities.