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.

Public Support for the Supreme Court in the 1970s

Abstract: In the 1960s, Murphy and Tanenhaus examined the linkages between public opinion and the U.S. Supreme Court. This article represents a new look at that question within the context of the 1970s, using national survey data. Four clusters of explanations are developed, based upon the previous literature, and tested, using trust in the Court as the dependent vanable. The two most important explanatory variables found are race and education, but race is declining as an explanation for variations in support for the Court.

US Supreme Court Opinions and their Audiences

Abstract: This book is the first study specifically to investigate the extent to which US Supreme Court justices alter the clarity of their opinions based on expected reactions from their audiences. The authors examine this dynamic by creating a unique measure of opinion clarity and then testing whether the Court writes clearer opinions when it faces ideologically hostile and ideologically scattered lower federal courts; when it decides cases involving poorly performing federal agencies; when it decides cases involving states with less professionalized legislatures and governors; and when it rules against public opinion. The data shows the Court writes clearer opinions in every one of these contexts, and demonstrates that actors are more likely to comply with clearer Court opinions.

The Anatomy of a Conservative Court: Judicial Review in Japan

Abstract: The Supreme Court of Japan is widely and justifiably considered the most conservative constitutional court in the world. Drawing on interviews conducted in Japan with a variety of judges, officials, and scholars – including seven current and former members of the Supreme Court itself – this article offers a political and institutional account of why the Court has failed to take an active role in the enforcement of Japan's postwar constitution. This account yields a number of insights into the relationship between judicial politics and electoral politics, and the role of institutional design in mediating between the two. The fact that the Court is conservative is perhaps only to be expected given its longtime immersion in a political environment dominated almost continuously by the center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Much of the government’s influence over the Court has been disguised, however, by the institutional design of the judiciary, which appears to enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy to manage its own affairs and even to decide who will serve on the Supreme Court. In effect, the government delegated political control of the judiciary to ideologically reliable agents within the judiciary itself – namely, the enormously powerful Chief Justice and his aides in the Court's administrative arm, the General Secretariat. Like the Chief Justice, the leaders of the General Secretariat are reliably orthodox jurists who have reached positions of power via a lifelong process of ideological vetting that all career judges must undergo. This group of judicial bureaucrats performs a wide range of sensitive activities ranging from the training and screening of new judges to the selection of Supreme Court law clerks, who are themselves elite career judges with both the ability and the inclination to oppose any liberal escapades on the part of the justices. The Japanese experience holds valuable lessons for students of judicial politics and institutional design. There is no plausible way of designing or structuring a court so as to insulate it entirely from political influence. The institutional characteristics of the court can, however, determine how responsive it will be to its political environment. An obviously relevant characteristic is the frequency with which political actors have the opportunity to shape the composition of the court. A less obvious, but no less relevant, characteristic is the extent to which power within the court is centralized or diffuse. The Supreme Court of Japan illustrates the importance of these characteristics: its organization and structure render it highly unlikely to depart from the wishes of the government for any meaningful period of time. The sheer number of seats on the Court, paired with a deliberate strategy of appointing justices close to mandatory retirement age, ensures a high degree of turnover that gives the government opportunities to adjust and correct the ideological direction of the Court on an ongoing basis. Similarly, the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual who is subject to replacement at relatively frequent intervals - namely, the Chief Justice - obviates sustained and repeated efforts to influence the direction of the Court.