Word: courting
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Indeed, the court's term was something of a group hug between the liberal and conservative Justices. The Supremes were far less divided than they seemed last year, when they sniped at one another in unusually personal terms. Despite some high-profile splits at the end, only 17% of the cases were decided by 5-4 votes--down sharply from the previous term, in which 33% of the cases were 5-4 splits. Cases upholding voter-ID requirements, execution by lethal injection, federal efforts to curb child pornography, and the detention of American citizens in Iraq were decided unanimously...
...what explains the new mood of bipartisan harmony on the Roberts Court? At least some of the credit goes to Roberts' personality and leadership style. He went out of his way to persuade his colleagues to turn down the volume and lighten up when they disagreed, even spicing up his dissent in a technical dispute between phone companies by borrowing playfully from Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone: "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose...
...individual Justices vote in closely divided cases. Embracing as a model his greatest predecessor, John Marshall, Roberts said he would use his power to assign majority opinions to promote narrow decisions agreed to by wide, bipartisan majorities rather than by polarizing 5-4 splits. On an evenly divided court, Roberts felt he could convince the liberal and conservative camps that converging on narrow opinions was in everyone's interest...
...third term, Roberts has achieved what his colleagues had thought was nearly impossible. His success is a reminder of the importance of personality when it comes to leadership on the Supreme Court, in which the quirks and temperaments of individual Justices are as important as judicial philosophy in shaping the law. Roberts told me that he thought much of Marshall's success was due to the fact that his colleagues liked and trusted him. Marshall persuaded the Justices, at the beginning of the 19th century, to live in the same boarding house and discuss cases over glasses of his excellent...
Roberts' success is also a reminder of the Chief Justice's limited but real power: as the Justice who speaks first at the court's private conference, he can frame the issues and influence the kinds of cases that the court agrees to hear in the first place. Under Roberts' leadership, the court has agreed to hear fewer polarizing constitutional cases and more cases of interest to business, which the Justices are more inclined to resolve without dividing along ideological lines. Of the 15 cases in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed briefs this year, 80% were decided...