Chief Justice Roberts in His Own Voice: The Chief Justice's Self-Assignment of Majority Opinions

8 Pages Posted: 5 Feb 2014 Last revised: 22 Apr 2014

Date Written: August 15, 2013

Abstract

Among the most significant prerogatives that a chief justice enjoys is the power to assign an opinion when in the majority. While The Behavior of Federal Judges only briefly alludes to "a self-expression component of the judicial utility function" for Supreme Court justices, I will indulge the assumption that there is something special about a chief justice’s choice of when to speak for the Court. In this essay, I examine the current chief justice’s practice of self-assigning majority opinions, with the goal of comparing his performance to the general patterns established by other chief justices.

Keywords: Supreme Court, Chief Justice

JEL Classification: D70, D73

Suggested Citation

Greenhouse, Linda, Chief Justice Roberts in His Own Voice: The Chief Justice's Self-Assignment of Majority Opinions (August 15, 2013). Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 496, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2390714 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2390714

Linda Greenhouse (Contact Author)

Yale Law School ( email )

P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520-8215
United States
203-432-2514 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/LGreenhouse.htm

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
525
Abstract Views
3,420
Rank
97,933
PlumX Metrics