Time Chart of the Justices Revisited: An Analysis of the Influences on the Time It Takes to Compose the Majority Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court1

Abstract

What affects the amount of time it takes for a justice to construct a majority opinion? We hypothesize that the amount of time expended on constructing the majority opinion is a function of its author’s efforts to anticipate and respond to the concerns, demands, and obstacles raised by different audiences—namely, the author’s fellow justices, the federal circuits, state supreme courts, and the mass public. Using event history analysis to model the hazard rate for majority opinions being completed by the Court, we find that when writing an opinion that speaks for the Court, justices are mostly concerned with their fellow justices, the federal circuits’ ideological distance from the Court, the ideological uncertainty in the state courts, and the mass public’s reaction to the Court ruling. They do not attend to uncertainty in the federal circuits and the state courts’ ideological distance from the Court. Our findings also show that a wide range of party, case, and Court characteristics influence the Court’s decisional time.