William D. Blake

"The Brooding Spirit of the Law": Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench

Journal article

William D. Blake, Hans J. Hacker
Justice System Journal, vol. 31(1), 2010, pp. 1-25
DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0098261X.2010.10767952
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APA   Click to copy
Blake, W. D., & Hacker, H. J. (2010). "The Brooding Spirit of the Law": Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench. Justice System Journal, 31(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0098261X.2010.10767952

Chicago/Turabian   Click to copy
Blake, William D., and Hans J. Hacker. “&Quot;The Brooding Spirit of the Law&Quot;: Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench.” Justice System Journal 31, no. 1 (2010): 1–25.

MLA   Click to copy
Blake, William D., and Hans J. Hacker. “&Quot;The Brooding Spirit of the Law&Quot;: Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench.” Justice System Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–25, doi:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0098261X.2010.10767952.

BibTeX   Click to copy 

@article{blake2010a,
  title = {"The Brooding Spirit of the Law": Supreme Court Justices Reading Dissents from the Bench},
  year = {2010},
  issue = {1},
  journal = {Justice System Journal},
  pages = {1-25},
  volume = {31},
  doi = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0098261X.2010.10767952},
  author = {Blake, William D. and Hacker, Hans J.}
}
In rare instances, a Supreme Court justice may elect to call attention to his or her displeasure with a majority decision by reading a dissenting opinion from the bench. We document this phenomenon by constructing a data set from audio files of Court proceedings and news accounts. We then test a model explaining why justices use this practice selectively by analyzing ideological, strategic, and institutional variables. Judicial review, formal alteration of precedent, size of majority coalition, and issue area influence this behavior. Ideological distance between the dissenter and majority opinion writer produces a counterintuitive relationship. We suspect that reading a dissent is an action selectively undertaken when bargaining and accommodation among ideologically proximate justices has broken down irreparably.
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