Judges Commons^™

"Was It Something I Said?": Losing The Majority On The Modern Supreme Court Of Canada, 1984-2011, Peter J. Mccormick

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Appeal court judges do not just vote and run; they vote and then they explain, at length, why theirs is the most reasonable position. Since the core of explanation is persuasion, this means that between the initial conference vote and the final decision, some of the judges sometimes change their minds; and this in turn means that sometimes an initial majority becomes a minority and vice versa, something which often leaves clear footprints in the written record. This paper demonstrates that this happens more often than we might think—some 255 times for the last three Chief Justiceships, or roughly once …