Cahill O'Callaghan has recently (2013) argued that disagreement on the United Kingdom Supreme Court can be interpreted as disagreement based on overarching moral values, and that differences of moral values can be inferred from a content analysis of judges' (seriatim) decisions. This claim, however, is based on hand-coding a limited number of opinions. In this paper, I use a keyword dictionary which operationalizes Moral Foundations Theory, and test whether there are significant differences between judges on the UK Supreme Court in the rate at which they resort to words associated with different moral foundations.
