Law Commons^™

Should Justices Ever Switch Votes?: Miller V. Albright In Social Choice Perpsective, Maxwell L. Stearns

Faculty Scholarship

This article will consider the implications of a rare, but conceptually significant, phenomenon in Supreme Court decision making. The Supreme Court has occasionally issued opinions in which the justices’ own assessments of the relationships between and among identified dispositive issues, and the votes cast by the individual justices over those issues, demonstrate a logical voting path leading to the dissenting result. In an even rarer group of just three known cases, one or more justices has attempted to avoid the undesirable consequence of a Supreme Court ruling that is in a significant sense at odds with itself by conceding to …