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Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization Advance Access originally published online on June 5, 2007
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 2007 23(2):276-302; doi:10.1093/jleo/ewm023
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the US Supreme Court

Jeffrey R. Lax*

Columbia University

Charles M. Cameron**

Princeton University

* Department of Political Science, Columbia University. Email: JRL2124{at}columbia.edu.

** Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Email: ccameron{at}princeton.edu.

We formulate a new game-theoretic model of bargaining on the US Supreme Court. In the model, a degree of monopoly power over policy endogenously accrues to the assigned writer despite an "open rule" permitting other justices to make counteroffers. We assume justices are motivated ultimately by a concern for judicial policy, but that the policy impact of an opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness, clarity, and craftsmanship—its legal quality. The effort cost of producing a high-quality opinion creates a wedge that the assignee can exploit to move an opinion from the median without provoking a winning counteroffer. We use this bargaining model as the foundation for a formal analysis of opinion assignment. Both the bargaining and opinion assignment models display rich and tractable comparative statics, allowing them to explain well-known empirical regularities, as well as to generate new propositions, all within a unified and internally consistent framework.


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