As others have observed, there was clearly an attempt to get a number of difficult cases out of the way before Justice O’Connor retired. Just before she left, we saw several unusual unanimous opinions — decided narrowly, and leaving the core issues to be litigated another day.

Chief Justice Roberts is a very smart and talanted man, but he is not going to totally transform the place in a matter of months. Change at the Supreme Court arrives at a notoriously glacial pace. The well known disagreements among the remaining seven Members of the Rehnquist Court haven’t suddenly been papered over.

OT’05: 18
OT’04: 24 (excludes Booker)
OT’03: 24 (excludes McConnell)
OT’02: 14
OT’01: 38

So in fact, seen this way, it could be argued at OT’02 was the most collegial in the last five years. I don’t know which metric (if either) is a more appropriate measure.

I appreciate your putting those statistics together. They’re interesting and likewise support the feeling I had that there has been more agreement among the Justices this term.

I wonder how those statistics might change if we were to consider the number of dissenting votes as a percentage of total votes issued by the Justices. In answering the original question about unanimous decisions, your analysis treats an 8-1 decision the same as a 5-4 decision. Certainly an 8-1 decision would indicate greater consensus than a 5-4 one.

I may take this one up if no one else does first when I get some free time on my hands.

There are some tough cases coming up, among them Hamdan, Perry (Texas redistricting), Carhart (partial birth abortion), public employee speech, and the various lethal injection petitions. I would be very surprised if any of the rulings ended up with a six-judge majority.

In any event, I applaud the Chief Justice’s efforts to bring collegiality to the bench.

This term has brought much of the same. The Court, whether due to the change in membership or not, has taken and decided some very dry cases that also aren’t that “hard” (I use that term with extreme caution). As I said in a similar post over at Volokh, today’s cases are a good example of the trend toward short, unanimous opinions resolving relatively straightforward legal issues.

Contrary to what some have said, O Centro is not necessarily an exception, especially in light of the Court’s opinion last term in Cutter v. Wilkinson. Ayotte and the Eleventh Amendment prison case are slightly more surprising, but then again, so were some of the cases last term (think Arthur Andersen, where the Court unanimously overturned the firm’s conviction).

Long story short: So far this term, the Court has handed down 37 opinions, 10 of which have generated dissents, i.e. 27%; but by this time last term, the Court had handed down 23 opinions, 12 of which – more than half – generated dissents, i.e. 52%; the term before that, 26 opinions, 10 of which generated dissents, i.e. 38%.

Now, that’s a very small sampling, and so my conclusion could be flawed for several reasons, but it does seem to me that WT is right, to some extent: the Roberts Court’s first semester has been relatively collegial by recent standards.

The last time this case was before the Supreme Court, it ruled 8-to-1 in favor of the abortion protesters. That was nearly as lopsided a margin as this time.

The fact that the court was unanimous proves only that the Seventh Circuit ignored the plain import of the Supreme Court’s prior ruling, not that the justices themselves have suddenly become consensus-oriented.

Federal laws such as the Hobbs Act were not designed to create a duplicative remedy for all conduct that may violate state tort law. That’s the lesson of this decision — and of past decisions that the Seventh Circuit chose to ignore.

Maybe it’s just because the big opinions like O Centro and Ayotte were unanimous that it seems this way, but is the Court entering some sort of collegiality period where they are reaching a consensus on previously hotly contested issues?

Does the CJ deserve any credit for this?