Scholars Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers have already examined the phenomenon of who interrupts whom among the Supreme Court Justices, noting that to a fairly large extent we can correlate interruptions during SCT oral arguments to sex and seniority, for example. Now, they’ve turned their attention to courtesy, asking (to the extent one can do so) who interrupts politely? They conclude that female Justices begin their SCT careers by being more polite than their male colleagues. As time goes on, they skew closer to the male norm but it seems that they still maintain more of that female “excuse me” we know so well in their approaches when speaking. More here.
