Chief Justice Plays Favorites When Assigning Opinions

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has never assigned Justice Sonia Sotomayor the court’s opinion in a “salient” case in her six years on the court, according to a new study by Harvard Law professor Richard J. Lazarus. Roberts assigned himself the most court opinions, and the second-highest number went to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. “In looking broadly at the chief justice’s 10 years on the job, Lazarus found that Roberts hesitates in assigning big decisions to the court’s most conservative and liberal members – Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the right, and Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the left,” the Washington Post reports. Lazarus wrote that, “For the closely divided cases in particular, the chief appears to place a premium on opinion writers who can write more narrowly and therefore can be more trusted to maintain the majority established” when the justices vote on cases in private conference. Sotomayor’s zero “salient” case assignments “is inherently unique and in this particular context could be a bit portentious,” Lazarus writes.