Other than presiding over Presidential impeachment trials, does the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court wield any powers or possess any priviliges significantly different than those of the Associate Justices? Or is “Chief Justice” strictly an honorary distinction?
His title is Chief Justice of the United States.
Aside from serving as President of the Court of Impeachment, the Chief Justice presides over meetings of the justices, as when they discuss writs of certiorari. He votes first when the justices vote. He chairs the Federal Judicial Center, which is the research and education agency of the federal judicial system. He assigns temporary judges to perform judicial duties in a United States Court of Appeals or a United States District Court. And he functions as the Chief Executive Officer of the Supreme Court’s administration and operations.
Sources:
Actually, I’d argue that two of the Chief’s functions are most important:
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He is the chief administrator not only of the Supreme Court, but of the federal judiciary as a whole, and
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As the highest-ranking member of the Court, he determines who writes the opinion on his side of all cases in which he participates. Much of the time, he’s on the winning side (often because the cases just aren’t that controversial), so that’s quite a power - he determines who will write The Opinion of the Court. Rehnquist’s predecessor, Warren Burger, was notorious for joining majorities specifically so that he could assign the opinion either to himself or to the most conservative judge who’d joined the majority. It sometimes backfired - if too many judges disagreed with the opinion that emerged, you’d end up with one of these horrible fractured decisions in which no opinion counted an absolute majority. So there was often a lot of negotiation involved.
Whether you agree with his judicial views or not, Rehnquist is considered among the most able Chief Justices we have had. He pays attention to administration, is fair to judges across ideological lines and has been a strong advocate for improving the salaries*, retention and recruitment of judiary members.
*Judicial salaries, although high in absoute terms, are ludicrously uncompetitive in the legal market. The Chief Justice himself earns less than an attorney at a major firm who has a mere 6-7 years’ experience.
According to various professors I’ve had who clerked at the Court during both the Burger and Rehnquist eras, the Chief has a very powerful effect on the structure and temperment of the Court beyond even his ability to assign the opinions.
–Cliffy, Esq.
Thank you all very much for the good 411 and the research involved thereto. Three questions:
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Libertarian, one of your sources appears to be the home page for the U.S. Court of Int’l Trade. I’m assuming that this court and the Supreme Court are not one and the same?
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OxyMoron, do you mean to say that Chief Justice Burger (and by implication other Chief Justices past) would actually change which party he’d find in favor of in a case just so he could control who’d get to write the opinion? Forgive my layman’s lack of appreciation for legal sophistication, but isn’t this sort of like saying “I think murder is wrong, but I’ll say that murder is right so I can write the Court’s Opinion?” Or did the scenarios run more like the Chief would remain neutral, wait on the sidelines until a consensus was formed, and then join (or in the case of a 4-4 split, create) the winning team? Or am I giving him too little credit – did he defect to the other side for the sake of sabotaging the power of the Majority Opinion, e.g., “in this case and under these circumstances we find that murder is O.K., but as to the future…”?
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In the final ruling on Bush v. Gore, the per curium ruling seemed to contain about fifteen different opinions (yes yes, I know that there’s only nine Justices). Does this mean that The Honorable William Rehnquist had to cut power of opinion-writing deals with the concurring Justices in order to fashion a majority?
** You’re welcome!
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Hoo-boy, we’re getting dangerously close to the limits of my knowledge, but I can give a starting point. It’s really a combination of your first and second questions. You see, Lib’s post is in fact backwards (sorry Lib!): the Justices vote in reverse order of seniority, with the Chief last. (I’d thought I remembered it that way from law school but waited until I could find a cite. It’s a PDF from the University of Minnesota Center for Community Legal Education; check out the description of the Court on page 2.) So the CJ can walk into chambers assuming he’s in the majority, and then know before he casts his vote that he’s in fact in the minority. That lets him change his vote in order to decide who writes the opinion.
It’s not necessarily a bad practice: in essence, the Chief Justice has the power to moderate the Court’s opinion.
Well, yes, but that’s really only the beginning when you have severely fractured opinions. In Bush v. Gore, one of the opinions actually got 5 unadulterated votes, so there wasn’t any lingering ambiguity. For a much stranger outcome, refer to the 1978 “reverse-discrimination” case, Bakke v. California. (Bakke, a white man, was denied admission to one of the UC-Davis graduate schools, although he had higher grades and test scores than black students who were admitted.)
To oversimply wildly, the case came out 4-4-1. Four justices thought that racial quotas were A-OK. Four justices thought that any sort of racial preference, quota or otherwise, was unconstitutional. One justice, Powell, thought that that preferences could be constitutional if they weren’t simply numerical quotas.
And ever since then everyone’s argued about what the hell to do with this decision. In effect, the academic world has followed Powell’s opinion - even though no other Justice joined it.
The general rule is that when there are multiple opinions and none garners a majority, you take the narrowing from the winning side. That is, in Bakke, although Powell probably had more in common with the anti-AA bloc, the ultimate effect of his opinion was “Bakke loses.” This, added to the four other justices who said any AA was OK meant there was a majority for the proposition “Bakke loses,” even if there wasn’t a majority for the rationale. Given that, Powell’s single opinion was a lot narrower than the four-vote opinion (which would have legitimized a much broader range of conduct), so Powell’s opinion became something like the law, although the lack of support makes it very weak.
As to the idea of Burger changing his vote, you’ve got it pretty much right, but it’s important to note that cases only make it to the Supreme Court if they’re pretty fine legal questions (and even then, 40% of cases heard are decided by unanimous decision), so to switch sides you wouldn’t necessarily have to take a very big step.
–Cliffy