The Centrality of Counterfactual Conditionals in House of Lords and US Supreme Courts Judgments

The paper is intended to test Nivelle and Van Belle's (2007) view on the causal function of counterfactual conditionals in legal discourse. It therefore extends their notion of counterfactuality to a larger corpus-based study of countefactuals, in which two courts - US Supreme Courts and House of Lords - are compared. Results demonstrate that counterfactual conditionals are a widespread resource through which judges construct their argumentation in both analysed courts.