- The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics
- The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Judicial Behavior
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Appointing Federal Judges
- Appointing Supreme Court Justices
- Judicial Elections: Judges and their “New-Style” Constituencies
- Federal Judicial Tenure
- Law Clerks
- Gatekeeping and Filtering in Trial Courts
- Access to Intermediate Appellate Courts
- Agenda-Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
- Courtroom Proceedings in U.S. Federal Courts
- Opinion Writing
- Vertical <i>Stare Decisis</i>
- Law in Judicial Decision-Making
- The Strategic Analysis of Judicial Behavior and the Separation of Powers
- Judicial Review
- The Role of Personal Attributes and Social Backgrounds on Judging
- Ideology and Partisanship
- The Economic Analysis of Judicial Behavior
- Judges and their Audiences
- Interest Groups and the Judiciary
- The Relationship between Courts and Legislatures
- Courts and Executives
- Covering the Courts
- The Supreme Court and Public Opinion
- Judicial Impact
- Cognition in the Courts: Analyzing the Use of Experiments to Study Legal Decision-Making
- New Measurement Technologies: A Review and Application to Nuremberg and Justice Jackson
- The Use of Observational Data to Study Law and the Judiciary
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter reviews the literature on opinion writing, focusing on the United States Supreme Court. It is important to understand the words used, the reasoning employed, and the tests devised by the Court. It is the legal rule extracted from the rationale of the decision that provides guidance for the future. Thus, the opinion of the court matters, not just the vote on the merits, and understanding how the opinion writing process works is essential to understanding the development of the law. This chapter includes a summary of the research on opinion assignment, the influence of law clerks in writing opinions, coalition formation, concurrences and dissents, and research analyzing the content of court opinions.
Keywords: opinion writing, Supreme Court, coalition formation, content of court opinions, bargaining and accommodation, opinion assignment, concurrences, dissents
Pamela C. Corley is Associate Professor of Political Science at Southern Methodist University.
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- The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics
- The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Judicial Behavior
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Appointing Federal Judges
- Appointing Supreme Court Justices
- Judicial Elections: Judges and their “New-Style” Constituencies
- Federal Judicial Tenure
- Law Clerks
- Gatekeeping and Filtering in Trial Courts
- Access to Intermediate Appellate Courts
- Agenda-Setting on the U.S. Supreme Court
- Courtroom Proceedings in U.S. Federal Courts
- Opinion Writing
- Vertical <i>Stare Decisis</i>
- Law in Judicial Decision-Making
- The Strategic Analysis of Judicial Behavior and the Separation of Powers
- Judicial Review
- The Role of Personal Attributes and Social Backgrounds on Judging
- Ideology and Partisanship
- The Economic Analysis of Judicial Behavior
- Judges and their Audiences
- Interest Groups and the Judiciary
- The Relationship between Courts and Legislatures
- Courts and Executives
- Covering the Courts
- The Supreme Court and Public Opinion
- Judicial Impact
- Cognition in the Courts: Analyzing the Use of Experiments to Study Legal Decision-Making
- New Measurement Technologies: A Review and Application to Nuremberg and Justice Jackson
- The Use of Observational Data to Study Law and the Judiciary
- Index
