ABSTRACT
To achieve their policy goals while in office, judges attempt to have their decisions correspond to their own personal preferences as closely as possible. The problem for judges working on state supreme courts, however, is that they must make decisions while in communion with other judges who may have their own views on the decision. One way judges attempt to respond to the constraints placed upon them by their colleagues is through a strategy of accommodation; the utilization of language, citations, and arguments that comport with a colleague’s preferences in a case to increase the likelihood they will sign off on the final opinion. In particular, accommodation may be most likely when judges signal they will write a dissenting opinion, as the majority author should attempt to dissuade or persuade others to sign off on their view. We develop a measure of accommodation using the level of cognitive complexity in judicial opinions. We then test to see what impact issuing a dissent has on the thought processes of the majority. We find that while including a dissent generally leads to stricter cognitive behavior, dissents do increase the cognitive complexity of a decision once the choice to dissent has been made.
