To Assign or Not to Assign? Majority Opinion Assignment in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts

Majority opinion assignment trends within the United States Supreme Court have demonstrated the decision-making behavior of the Chief Justice, though Associate Justices also have the ability to determine the author of majority opinions. This research aims to observe opinion assignment trends in both the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, and distinguish between the motivating factors that influence the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices when each assumes the role of majority opinion assigner. In using data from the Supreme Court Database from 1986 to 2018 to conduct a logistic regression, I observed trends in opinion assignment behavior by looking at justice ideology, size of the majority vote coalition, legal salience, and subject matter importance. The results imply that the Chief Justice is influenced by a combination of these factors when he acts as the opinion assigner, while Associate Justices are most motivated by the ideological distance between themselves and potential opinion authors. Recognizing the majority opinion assignment behavior of both the Chief Justice and Associate Justices allows judicial scholars to obtain a higher understanding of the differences in decision-making within modern Justices on the United States Supreme Court.