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Circumstance And Strategy: Jointly Authored Supreme Court Opinions, Laura Ray

Laura K. Ray

The standard form of authorship for a Supreme Court opinion is a single author who then may be joined by any colleagues who are in agreement. There is, however, a significant and overlooked variant of this form, one used in a small cluster of major cases, most of them landmark decisions, over the past seventy years: the jointly authored opinion. In these cases, there may be as many as nine authors signing an opinion (as in Cooper v. Aaron) or as few as two (as in McConnell v. FEC). All the signatories may be credited with the entire opinion (as …