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Passing and Strategic Voting on the U.S. Supreme Court

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Timothy R. Johnson ,
James F. Spriggs II  and
Paul J. Wahlbeck
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Abstract

Analyzing strategic aspects of judicial decisionmaking is an important element in understanding how law develops. In this article, we examine sophisticated voting on the U.S. Supreme Court by empirically modeling justices' decisions to pass when it is their turn to vote during conference discussions. We argue that, due to the opinion assignment norm, the chief justice may pass when one of the key conditions necessary for sophisticated voting—certainty about the views held by other justices and the agenda—is lacking. By passing, the chief can view his colleagues' votes in order to determine which vote will allow him to assign the majority opinion and, ultimately, forward his policy preferences. Using data from Justice Lewis F. Powell's conference notes, we show that the chief passes for this purpose, and that doing so is an effective strategy. In addition, we show that the senior associate justice in a case, who has a nontrivial chance of assigning the majority opinion, also passes for strategic reasons. As we expect, the data indicate that the remaining associates seem not to pass for strategic purposes.

Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 2005 , pp. 349 - 377
Copyright
© 2005 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

We appreciate John Jacob's assistance with the papers of Justice Lewis Powell. Johnson thanks the University of Minnesota's Department of Political Science and the MacMillan Travel Grant fund for financial assistance for the data collection, and Matt Roberts, Jeff Hubbard, Dan Carden, and Carey Olney at the University of Minnesota for their research assistance. Spriggs thanks the Academic Senate at the University of California, Davis, for financial support. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2001 and 2002 annual meetings of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and received the 2002 American Judicature Society Award from the Law and Courts Section of APSA.

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