Friction on First Street: An Analysis of the Factors Influencing Separate Opinion Authorship on the U.S. Supreme Court

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Irvin, Steven
Area of Honors:
Political Science
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Adam Wass Nye, Thesis Supervisor
Gretchen G Casper, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Supreme Court
Judicial Behavior
Abstract:
Separate opinion authorship has a long and storied history for the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. From the unity of Chief Justice John Marshall to the breakdown of consensus in the 1940s, there is no denying that separate opinions and their power are well known to the justice who must decide whether to employ them. This research analyzes the factors that influence justices to break from the majority of their colleagues and write their own opinion, whether it is a dissent, regular concurrence, or special concurrence. Using data from the 1946 to 2009 term, this study found that ideological distance, time constraints, lower court dissent, precedent alteration, the existence of a minimum winning coalition, salience, and seniority all influenced, albeit to various degrees, a justice’s decision to author a separate opinion. Furthermore, the use of different measures was demonstrated to have a notable impact on the measured variable in question, but not on the rest of the variables in the model. Lastly, analysis of subsets of the data revealed that, depending on the variable in question, joining and authoring separate opinions are not the same and sometimes involve a different set of considerations for the justices. Furthermore, salience affected justices’ other considerations. For example, time constraints were no longer a significant factor for the justices in salient cases. Finally, only analyzing data from one chief justice’s tenure was shown to lead to possible anomalous findings, highlighting the importance of utilizing as much data as possible from as long a time period as possible.