Download And Enjoy The Puzzle Of Unanimity: Consensus On The United States Supreme Court Authored By Pamela Corley Available In Interactive EBook

very well crafted work, The focus Why is there as much unanimity on the Supreme Court in their decisions as we see We often read of a badly fractured corps of nine Justices, divided by ideology, by differing views of how the Supreme Court ought to interpret the laws and the Constitution.
At the outset, the authors note that about/of all decisions have been unanimous since, During theterm with William Rehnquist presiding as Chief Justice, that figure reachedbefore declining, Indeed, the authors contend that page"the majority of the Court's decisions every term are unanimous or highly consensual.
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The book points out that this appears to be in contradiction with the influential view of Segal and Spaeth the "attitudinal model" that ideology and values are the drivers of decision making on the Court.
This volume insists that we must entertain several factors as they affect the Supreme Court's decision making: a ideology and values, b legal considerations, c strategic thinking by Justices, d institutional changes, and e casespecific issues.
They do not deny the role of ideologybut they do claim that we need to have a multifactor explanation that takes into account other factors.


The substantive chapters begin with, in Chapter, a description of when consensus decision making on the court moved toward dissensusthe Roosevelt Court othersincluding the authors of this book do note earlier influences, such as the "Judges Bill," passed by Congress in the mods.
Chapterlays out the

full model advocated by the work, Chapterprovides results of actual data analysis to indicate the value of the model, Chapterexamines a related issuethe presence of more than one opinion being delivered, It is not uncommon to see "concurring opinions" in a decision, That is, a variety of Justices accept the majority decisionbut they have differing views as to why this is the case.
Chapterconsiders an interesting issue: Why do Justices accept certain cases only to produce a unanimous decision The argument is that there are strategic considerations here, uniting Justices with very different perspectives.


The final chapter is a nice summing up of the volume's main points and brings matters together.


All in all, a very satisfying work on Supreme Court decision making, The U. S. Supreme Court typically rules on cases that present complex legal questions, Given the challenging nature of its cases and the popular view that the Court is divided along ideological lines, it's commonly assumed that the Court routinely hands down equallydivided decisions.
Yet the justices actually issue unanimous decisions in approximately one third of the cases they decide,

Drawing on data from the U, S. Supreme Court database, internal court documents, and the justices' private papers, The Puzzle of Unanimity provides the first comprehensive account of how the Court reaches consensus.
Pamela Corley, Amy Steigerwalt, and Artemus Ward propose and empirically test a theory of consensus they find consensus is a function of multiple, concurrentlyoperating forces that cannot be fully accounted for by ideological attitudes.
In this thorough investigation, the authors conclude that consensus is a function of the level of legal certainty and its ability to constrain justices' ideological preferences.
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