Academic

Blake & Hacker on Reading Dissents

By Lawrence Solum

William Blake and Hans Hacker (University of Texas at Austin and Arkansas State University - Department of Political Science) has posted The Brooding Spirit of the Law: Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

In rare instances, a Supreme Court justice may elect to call attention to her displeasure with a majority decision by reading a dissenting opinion from the bench. We document this phenomenon by constructing a dataset from audio files of Court proceedings and news accounts. We then test a model explaining why justices utilize this practice selectively by analyzing institutional, strategic, and ideological variables. Judicial review, stare decisis, size of majority coalition, and issue area exert influence on this behavior. Ideological distance between the dissenter and majority opinion writer produces a counterintuitive relationship. We conclude that reading a dissent is an action selectively undertaken when bargaining and accommodation among ideologically proximate justices has broken down irreparably.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 12, 2009 (boomark / email).