The judges of the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) take similar decisions on fundamental rights issues. However, they function in different contexts where politics and media attention are concerned. The aim of this study is to investigate, in line with Bhatia’s (2006) theory on variation in professional genres, whether this difference influences the language use of the judges. The material for the study consists of dissenting opinions written by individual judges of the two courts. These opinions were searched for boosters with a corpus analysis toolkit. Subsequently the boosters were classified into four pragmatic categories based on Boginskaya (2022). As a qualitative step the dissenting opinions were analysed to establish how the judges used the categories of boosters, especially when positioning themselves towards the majority. The findings show that boosters occur frequently in the dissents of both courts and that these boosters are to a large degree identical, but that the SCOTUS judges use boosters considerably more often on average. Analysis of the categories of boosters revealed that SCOTUS justices use them frequently to express that the viewpoint of the majority is inconceivable. ECtHR judges, by comparison, are less confrontational. The findings also indicate a large degree of variation between individual judges within both courts. This study points to how the use of boosters by dissenting judges takes shape in a ‘triangle of dissent’, in which the culture and practice of the court, the characteristics of the genre and the background and intentions of the individual judge come together. These three dimensions shape the way in which the dissenting judge as a professional uses boosters and, in doing so, aligns him or herself towards the majority. The thesis contributes to genre analysis, refines the analysis of booster use and offers a basis for further linguistic study into dissenting opinions, the effect of legal culture on legal discourse and for (comparative) studies on discourse of the SCOTUS and the ECtHR.