Consensual and Nonconsensual Decisions in Unanimous Opinions of the United States Courts of Appeals

to divided decisions. Unanimous decisions of the U.S. courts of appeals from two time periods separated by three decades were studied. Contrary to the widespread expectation that most unanimous decisions were truly consensual decisions whose outcomes were determined by precedent or other institutional/role restraints, a substantial proportion of the outcomes unanimous decisions both periods were found to reflect the ideological preferences of the panel majority. Criminal appeals and the unanimous reversals of decisions cases raising economic issues were the types of cases which unanimous decisions were most likely to be consistent with the ideology of the court majority. Following the pioneering work of Herman Pritchett (1941, 1948), a whole generation of students of judicial decision making has focused on the votes (rather than the opinions) of judges while developing increasingly sophisticated methods of quantitative analysis. With few exceptions, modern students of appellate courts have limited these analyses to nonunanimous decisions. This limitation is usually based on Pritchett's assumption that some cases present the judge with situations sufficient to alter the outcomes while other cases do not (Goldman, 1969, p. 217). If this assumption is accepted, one must then ask how one knows which cases present reasonable decisional alternatives. The answer supplied by the Pritchett model is that dissent may be taken as an objective indicator that legitimate alternatives were open to the judges. Consensus, on the other hand, is thought to indicate the absence of a real choice situation. The reasons for the exclusion of unanimous decisions the analysis even of courts with much lower dissent rates than those found on the Supreme Court are spelled out most clearly by Sheldon Goldman. In studies of the U.S. courts of appeals Goldman's model suggests that in general a consensually decided case indicates that 'objectively' the case situation (either because of clear-cut precedent, or the straight-forward