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Majority opinion

About: Majority opinion is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 54845 citations. The topic is also known as: opinion of the court.


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07 Oct 1993
TL;DR: The history of the US Supreme Court can be traced back to the first day of the first session of the United States Supreme Court in 1790, when it was called the Court of Justices as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: When the first Supreme Court convened in 1790, it was so ill-esteemed that its justices frequently resigned in favor of other pursuits. John Rutledge stepped down as Associate Justice to become a state judge in South Carolina; John Jay resigned as Chief Justice to run for Governor of New York; and Alexander Hamilton declined to replace Jay, pursuing a private law practice instead. As Bernard Schwartz shows in this landmark history, the Supreme Court has indeed travelled a long and interesting journey to its current preeminent place in American life. In A History of the Supreme Court, Schwartz provides the finest, most comprehensive one-volume narrative ever published of our highest court. With impeccable scholarship and a clear, engaging style, he tells the story of the justices and their jurisprudence--and the influence the Court has had on American politics and society. With a keen ability to explain complex legal issues for the nonspecialist, he takes us through both the great and the undistinguised Courts of our nation's history. He provides insight into our foremost justices, such as John Marshall (who established judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, an outstanding display of political calculation as well as fine jurisprudence), Roger Taney (whose legacy has been overshadowed by Dred Scott v. Sanford), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and others. He draws on evidence such as personal letters and interviews to show how the court has worked, weaving narrative details into deft discussions of the developments in constitutional law. Schwartz also examines the operations of the court: until 1935, it met in a small room under the Senate--so cramped that the judges had to put on their robes in full view of the spectators. But when the new building was finally opened, one justice called it "almost bombastically pretentious," and another asked, "What are we supposed to do, ride in on nine elephants?" He includes fascinating asides, on the debate in the first Court, for instance, over the use of English-style wigs and gowns (the decision: gowns, no wigs); and on the day Oliver Wendell Holmes announced his resignation--the same day that Earl Warren, as a California District Attorney, argued his first case before the Court. The author brings the story right up to the present day, offering balanced analyses of the pivotal Warren Court and the Rehnquist Court through 1992 (including, of course, the arrival of Clarence Thomas). In addition, he includes four special chapters on watershed cases: Dred Scott v. Sanford, Lochner v. New York, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade. Schwartz not only analyzes the impact of each of these epoch-making cases, he takes us behind the scenes, drawing on all available evidence to show how the justices debated the cases and how they settled on their opinions. Bernard Schwartz is one of the most highly regarded scholars of the Supreme Court, author of dozens of books on the law, and winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. In this remarkable account, he provides the definitive one-volume account of our nation's highest court.

91 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the parties through the briefs submitted on the merits have the ability to influence the content of the opinions of the Supreme Court, through the submission of arguments.
Abstract: Do parties' briefs influence the content of Supreme Court opinions? The author contends that the parties, through the briefs submitted on the merits, have the ability to influence the content of op...

90 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition and demonstrate that both features undermine the bargaining power of the Court's median and shift influence towards the coalition median.
Abstract: Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first is that in deciding a case, justices must resolve a concrete dispute, and that they may have preferences over which party wins the specific case confronting them. The second is that justices who are dissatisfied with an opinion are free to write concurrences (and dissents). We demonstrate that both features undermine the bargaining power of the Court's median and shift influence towards the coalition median. An empirical analysis of concurrence behavior provides significant support for the model.

90 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors formulate a theoretical framework based on current principal-agent models of the judiciary and use it to structure an empirical analysis of a random sample of 500 Supreme Court cases, yielding over 10,000 subsequent treatments in the U.S. Courts of Appeals.
Abstract: Why do lower courts treat Supreme Court precedents favorably or unfavorably? To address this question, we formulate a theoretical framework based on current principal-agent models of the judiciary. We use the framework to structure an empirical analysis of a random sample of 500 Supreme Court cases, yielding over 10,000 subsequent treatments in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. When the contemporary Supreme Court is ideologically estranged from the enacting Supreme Court, lower courts treat precedent much more harshly. Controlling for the ideological distance between the enacting and contemporary Supreme Courts, the preferences of the contemporary lower court itself are unrelated to its behavior. Hence, hierarchical control appears strong and effective. At the same time, however, a lower court's previous treatments of precedent strongly influence its later treatments. The results have important implications for understanding legal change and suggest new directions for judicial principal-agency theory.

90 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: This article derived a systematic accounting of the justice with the highest (posterior) probability of having served as the median for each Term since 1937, based on methods developed by Martin and Quinn.
Abstract: Black's \"Median Voter Theorem\" now figures prominently and crucially in a wide array of research on the United States Supreme Court, from studies on the nomination and confirmation of Justices, to investigations into the Court's resolution of disputes, to analyses of its impact on the hierarchy of justice. Nonetheless, and regardless of the substantive focus of the investigation, the question of how to locate the median Justice looms large. Because all extant answers have their share of problems, we set out to develop a more compelling approach-one that relies on methods developed by Martin and Quinn. Via this approach we derive a systematic accounting of the Justice with the highest (posterior) probability of having served as the median for each Term since 1937.

89 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202313
202238
202114
202027
201923
201820