The History of the Per Curiam Opinion: Consensus and Individual Expression on the Supreme Court LAURA KRUGMAN RAY* Introduction Readers of Supreme Court opinions have become so accustomed in recent years to the mul tiple concurrences and dissents that accompany important opinions that it is difficult to recall that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the past century that the Court’s tradi tional balance of the institutional and the personal has shifted from an insistence on presenting what Learned Hand termed “monolithic solidarity” to the world.1 That insistence began with Chief Justice Marshall’s determination that the Court should resolve its cases, not seriatim, with each Justice writing separately, but instead in a single, unified opinion.2 The resulting cul ture of the Court, one that discouraged both dissenting and concurring opinions as assaults on this unified front, persisted from Marshall’s day into the 1930s.3 The Court in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus deliberately submerged the idea of a personal voice in the fic tion ofa collective voice, one that spoke for the institution rather than for the Justice who served as its designated scribe. The monolith began to splinter in the early decades of the twentieth century and today is barely recognizable. With the dra matic upsurge in the number of dissents and concurrences written by the Justices since the late 1930s,4 there has been no lack of opinions that speak directly—even emotionally— about their authors’ individual positions. At the same time, however, those inside and out side the Court still value the ideal of a major ity opinion that speaks for all the Justices who have joined it. The consequence for the Court of this tension between institutional and indi vidual authorship is a more complicated and more finely calibrated jurisprudence, one in which Justices feel free to pick and choose among the parts of a colleague’s opinion, joining only those that they wholeheartedly THE HISTORY OF THE PER CURIAM OPINION 177 endorse and writing separately to detail their points of divergence. This shifting balance between the imper sonal and the individual is evident as well in the history of what was traditionally the most impersonal variety of opinion, the per curiam, which suppressed not only the identity of its author but the idea of attributed authorship it self. In its earliest appearances, the per curiam was true to its name, authored anonymously and presented “by the Court” rather than by a designated Justice, to express a result that en joyed full institutional support.5 The subtext of a per curiam was clear: this case is so easily resolvable, so lacking in complexity or dis agreement among the Justices, that it requires only a brief, forthright opinion that any mem ber of the Court could draft and that no mem ber of the Court need sign. The per curiam was not, however, insulated from the shift in the Court’s opinion writing process from impersonality to individual expression. Rather, the per curiam has functioned as a mi crocosm of that shift, reflecting in its evolu tion the increasing tendency of the Justices to assert their personal views even in the most impersonal context. Thus, in the late 1930s, as concurrences and dissents proliferated, the role of the per curiam also changed. Per curiam opinions in creasingly came with dissents attached, creat ing an oxymoronic form, one that simulta neously insisted on both institutional consensus and individual disagreement. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Court also found that the impersonal nature of the per curiam made it the ideal instrument for a variety of strategic purposes, from the efficient resolution of ur gent cases to the evasion of controversial is sues to the making of new law by indirection. By the 1970s, the Court had adapted the per curiam to a purpose diametrically opposed to its original use, producing per curiam opin ions accompanied by as many as nine separate opinions, each asserting a strong and inde pendent position. Viewed against the backdrop of the Court’s increasingly individualized opinion writing, the story of the per curiam encapsu lates the larger history of the Court’s...