Evaluating the Effects of Multiple Opinion Rationales on Supreme Court Legitimacy

Abstract

The literature on the U.S. Supreme Court has paid substantial attention to the perceived legitimacy of the Court’s decisions. However, much less attention has been paid to the perceived legitimacy of the reasons the Court provides for its opinions. We design two experiments to understand how the public perceives opinion content. Unlike prior studies, we take it as a given that the Court uses legal reasons in its decisions. This offers us a baseline by which to compare departures from these legal reasons. We find that extralegal reasons, when paired with legal reasons, do nothing to harm the legitimacy of the Court. Furthermore, we find that even with a lack of legal reasons, the use of extralegal reasons does not harm the legitimacy of the Court, even among those who find that these reasons are inappropriate for the Court to use.