Abstract
For the U.S. Supreme Court, opinion writing is an all-important activity with critical consequences for law and public policy. The authoring of separate -- dissenting or concurring -- opinions, though, is frequently regarded as deleterious to the Court's institutional legitimacy and the efficacy of the majority opinion. Research has therefore focused on the occurrence of separate opinions with scholarly consensus holding they arise as a function of ideological distance, the number of issue dimensions on which to disagree, and other contextual factors. Leveraging the content of all Court opinions between 1955 and 2009, I argue issue dimensions are instead a variable which dissenting justices seek to strategically alter. An examination of the effect of separate opinion content on majority opinions indicates dissenting opinions force majority opinions to address additional topics, and I provide evidence the dynamic is driven by the strategic behavior of dissenting justices seeking to realign the Court.
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