Status characteristics and their intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts

Abstract

We test whether justices’ traits – race, gender, age, previous judicial experience, education, and tenure – are associated with opinion assignment patterns as suggested by status characteristics theory. Female justices were more likely to be asked to write the majority opinion, particularly if the case raised a “women’s issue.” In complex cases, however, both female and African American justices were less likely to be selected to write the majority opinion. Extending intersectionality perspectives, advances in age were associated with a decreased likelihood in women and African American justices receiving the assignment, though at distinct age ranges.

Full text

Status characteristics and their intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in
state supreme courts
Erin B. Kaheny, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
Milwaukee, WI, USA
John Szmer, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of
North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA
Robert K. Christensen, rc@byu.edu Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics,
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, US
Abstract
We test whether justices’ traits – race, gender, age, previous judicial experience,
education, and tenure – are associated with opinion assignment patterns as suggested
by status characteristics theory. Female justices were more likely to be asked to write
the majority opinion, particularly if the case raised a “women’s issue.” In complex
cases, however, both female and African American justices were less likely to be
selected to write the majority opinion. Extending intersectionality perspectives,
advances in age were associated with a decreased likelihood in women and African
American justices receiving the assignment, though at distinct age ranges.
Article History
Received 13 October 2017
Accepted 19 December 2018
Keywords
Intersectionality; gender studies; judicial behavior; race studies
Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and
their intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme
courts. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538

Introduction
In most collegial common law courts, a single written opinion conveys the court’s
decision and underlying legal arguments. The opinion constitutes precedent that guides
future courts addressing similar issues. The reasoning can be expansive, thus
constraining a broader range of potential legal disputes, or the reasoning can be
narrow, resulting in limited precedential scope. Moreover, the persuasiveness of the
legal reasoning contained in the opinion likely affects both the influence of the opinion
and the likelihood that the opinion will be overturned. In other words, the policy
impact of a judicial decision is likely a function of how the opinion is crafted.
Typically, the authorship of the opinion of the court is assigned to one of the judges in
the majority coalition. Even with extensive bargaining and negotiation with other
members of the coalition (e.g., Bowie, Songer, and Szmer 2014; Maltzman, Spriggs,
and Wahlbeck 2000; Wahlbeck, Spriggs, and Maltzman 1998), the initial assignee is
well-positioned to exert disproportionate influence over the policy content of the
opinion (Bonneau et al. 2007; Lax and Cameron 2007). Interestingly, the identity of
the opinion author also influences how the public perceives the policy content of the
decision. As Boddery and Yates (2014, 853) articulated, “the majority opinion writer
is, in some sense, the legal community’s rough equivalent of a celebrity endorsement.”
The scholarly salience of opinion assignment is reflected in the voluminous research
on the topic in the setting of the US Supreme Court (e.g., Brenner 1982; Brenner and
Spaeth
1988; Maltzman and Wahlbeck 1996, 2004; Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck 2000;
McLauchlan 1972; Rathjen 1974; Rohde 1972; Slotnick 1979a, 1979b; Spaeth 1983;
Wahlbeck 2006). However, even as judicial behavior studies have increasingly focused

on lower courts, few studies have examined opinion assignment in those contexts.
Previous work on state courts of last resort has focused on describing cross-court
variations in deliberation and assignment processes (Hall 1990; Hughes, Wilhelm, and
Vining 2015), and a handful of studies have examined the influence of legal expertise
on opinion assignment in the US Courts of Appeals by identifying whether certain
judges disproportionately write opinions in certain issue areas (Cheng 2008; Nash
2015).
We identified four published studies that statistically modeled lower court opinion
assignment decisions. Two of these studies focused on the US Courts of Appeals. One
study, conducted by Bowie, Songer, and Szmer (2014), examined political and
institutional factors affecting assignment on these courts. As revealed in this analysis,
most political factors were irrelevant; opinion assignment was largely a function of
institutional factors like caseload and proxies for the ability of the judge to write a
persuasive opinion. Exceptions involved the tendency to self-assign, particularly in
salient cases, and the race of the judge. According to Bowie and colleagues, non-white
judges were less likely to receive the majority opinion assignment. In a second courts
of appeals study limited to sexual harassment decisions, Farhang, Kastellec, and
Wawro (2015) found that female and liberal justices were more likely to receive the
majority opinion assignment.
Additionally, two published studies have featured majority opinion assignment
processes of state courts of last resort. One of the justifications of the Vining and
Wilhelm (2011) case salience measure (i.e., whether the major state newspaper
discussed the case on the front page) included cross-tabulations of self-assignment and
salience, showing chief justices author more opinions of state high courts in salient

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
cases. Meanwhile, using a multivariate model of majority opinion assignment,
Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch (2012) looked at the impact of the method of
assignment (discretionary, random, or rotating (see Hall 1990)) in these venues for the
1995–1998 time period. Christensen and colleagues found differing patterns of race
and gender discrimination when courts used random or discretionary assignment but no
evidence of discriminatory assignment in states using rotation assignment. In
discretionary assignment courts, for example, African American judges were less
likely to receive the assignment to write the opinion of the court (Christensen, Szmer,
and Stritch 2012). On the other hand, opinions were more frequently assigned to
women in non-salient cases, but they were less likely to author the opinion in salient
cases (Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch 2012).
Building on this previous work, especially that of Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch
(2012), we more deeply investigate majority opinion assignment in states courts of last
resort in those states that employ discretionary opinion assignment across the 1995–
1998 period. Specifically, we further extend the application of status characteristics
theory to these decisions, by examining whether the influence of a judge’s gender or
race on the likelihood of getting the assignment is conditioned on the subject of the
case and/or its complexity, something not addressed in previous work, but which is of
a critical nature given how stereotypes surrounding task assignment can operate. In
addition, unlike previous work, we seek to understand how the influence of a justice’s
gender and race might be conditioned by the justice’s age. Our focus on state supreme
courts is motivated by the increasing role of these courts in policy, in part fueled by
federal devolution of responsibilities (Vining and Wilhelm 2011). In addition, as we

seek to highlight the role of diversity in majority opinion assignment, our objective is
facilitated by the demographic variation that exists across state courts of last resort
(Geolzhauser 2011).
Seeking to discern the extent to which a judge’s gender, race, and age might condition
the judge’s chances of receiving the majority opinion assignment is important for
multiple reasons. First, it is possible that a judge’s background may shape, in part, the
approach the judge takes when crafting the rationale of the court and, hence, may have
a direct impact on the doctrinal policy a court produces. Second, studies in other
contexts have suggested that tasks are sometimes allocated based on who is presumed
to be most qualified, with race and gender playing a role in shaping perceived
competence (e.g., Fraidin and Hollingshead 2005). A critical question to ask is whether
women and minority judges are disproportionately disadvantaged in the distribution of
these important policy-making opportunities, based on possible biases, an understudied
question in assessments of appellate court decision making and processes. Along these
lines, moreover, background traits are more richly understood in conjunction with one
another (see, e.g., Collins and Moyer 2008). Following intersectionality theories, we
examine how a judge’s gender and race may interact with another key trait by which
individuals are often “judged” – their age. Thus, our study provides several significant
contributions to the group and identity politics literature by revealing the conditional
nature of the effects of gender, race, and age on perceptions of political competence.
The study also provides further evidence of the likely operation of stereotypes among
political elites.
Theory and hypotheses
Many judicial scholars have contributed to the literature on majority opinion
assignment (e.g., Bonneau et al. 2007; Brenner 1982; Brenner and Spaeth 1988;

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Farhang, Kastellec, and Wawro 2015; Lax and Cameron 2007; Maltzman and
Wahlbeck 1996, 2004; Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck 2000; McLauchlan 1972;
Rathjen 1974; Rohde 1972; Slotnick 1979a, 1979b; Spaeth 1983; Wahlbeck 2006).
These studies often posit a relationship between the political preferences of the
assigning judge and the judge chosen to author the court’s opinion (Maltzman and
Wahlbeck 1996; Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2004; Rohde 1972). However, some work,
most notably by Lax and Cameron (2007), also suggests that a judge’s skill in writing
an opinion might play a significant role in who gets tapped to write it. As they
maintain, “the policy impact of a legal opinion depends partly on its persuasiveness,
clarity, and craftsmanship – its legal quality” (Lax and Cameron 2007, 277). They
further add that, “because an opinion’s legal quality affects its reception, justices are
induced to care about legal quality, even if policy is ultimately their real concern” (Lax
and Cameron 2007, 277).
If opinion quality matters, we would expect opinion assigners to account for the
experience and expertise of judges when making assignments. Not surprisingly, many
prior studies support this notion – and many of these studies focused on the US
Supreme Court. We know, for example, that freshman justices are less likely to receive
the majority opinion assignment in salient cases (Brenner 2001). Scholars also suggest
expertise matters. First, justices tend to specialize in a subset of issues, authoring more
than their share of opinions in a small number of substantive areas of the law (Brenner
1984; Brenner and Spaeth 1986). And, in the Supreme Court, substantive experts are
more likely to write the majority opinion (Maltzman and Wahlbeck 1996) – a tendency
magnified in politically and legally salient cases (Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2004).

Expertise also appears to influence US Courts of Appeals opinion assignment
decisions. For example, former Sentencing Commissioners are more frequently tasked
to author opinions addressing criminal sentencing issues, while former bankruptcy
judges are more likely to write opinions in bankruptcy cases (Nash 2015). Moreover,
appeals court judges tend to specialize as well, writing the opinion of the court in a
disproportionate number of cases in particular issue areas (Cheng 2008).
While expertise may be an objective concept, the assigner’s subjective perception of
her colleague actually influences the assignment. As with other work groups, a peer’s
competence on a court may be in the eye of the beholder and as, Bunderson (2003,
558) notes, “members of a group must rely on a variety of manifest cues … in forming
expertise attributions.” We maintain that judges on appellate courts develop opinions
regarding the competence with which their peers will accomplish the task of writing a
majority opinion. A number of judicial traits, including judge gender and race, may
influence the nature of those assessments (Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch 2012).
This idea that individual traits may be used to judge an individual’s ability to handle a
given job is at the heart of status characteristics theory (Ridgeway et al. 2009; Wagner
and Berger 1997). As Bunderson (2003, 560) summarizes:
The theory begins with the assertion that power and prestige orders in task groups are
driven by the “performance expectations” that individuals hold for one another,
expectations about one’s own and other group members’ ability to contribute to
accomplishing group tasks. When members of a group share high performance
expectations for a particular member, they defer to that group member in making
decisions and taking collaborative action under the assumption that doing so will help
them accomplish the group’s goals. As a result, a group member for whom others hold

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
high performance expectations will be given more opportunities to participate in and
influence group decisions and outcomes.
These sorts of determinations, however, are a function of “status cues” (Bunderson
2003, 561). Bunderson (2003) further describes two major types of cues, both of which
are relevant to the present study. “Specific status cues,” he notes, are “those personal
characteristics that are believed to provide information about an individual’s
competence or expertise in relation to a clearly defined and specifiable task”
(Bunderson 2003, 561). Examples of these types of cues, he adds, might be “indicators
of task experience or task-relevant training and education” (Bunderson 2003, 561). In
the context of courts and majority opinion assignment practices, we might very well
consider a judge’s time on the bench, legal education, and prior judicial experience to
serve as these sorts of cues, and research on majority opinion assignment certainly
suggests their importance (Brenner and Hagle 1996; Cheng 2008; Cohen 2002;
Howard 1981; Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2004; Maltzman, Spriggs, and Wahlbeck
2000; Slotnick 1979a).
The second broad category of heuristics discussed by Bunderson (2003, 561) involves
“diffuse status cues.” These involve “visible physical characteristics and social
category differences,” including race and gender along with other traits (Bunderson
2003, 561). While justices who have a longer tenure on the bench or “prestigious
educational backgrounds” (Slotnick 1983, 577) might be acknowledged as especially
skillful, female and minority justices may be subject to largely negative stereotypes on
the basis of their gender and race (Fridkin and Kenney 2009; Haynie 2002; Sigelman et
al. 1995). This expectation is consistent with prior studies of the ABA ratings of lower

federal court nominees. Both women and racial minorities tend to receive lower ratings
than white male nominees (Haire 2001; Sen 2014). Moreover, this relationship persists
even after controlling for education, experience, and partisanship (Sen 2014).
Similarly, after accounting for reversal rate, law school alma mater, experience,
disciplinary record, and reported scandals, women and minority state judges typically
receive lower judicial performance evaluations (Gill, Lazos, and Waters 2011).
Based on the preceding theoretical framework, we articulate the following hypotheses:
H1: Justices with longer tenures are more likely to get the majority opinion assignment
than justices who have served on the bench for fewer years.
H2: Justices who graduated from highly-ranked law schools are more likely to get the
majority opinion assignment than those who did not graduate from such programs.
H3: Justices with previous judicial experience are more likely to receive the majority
opinion assignment than those who came onto the court without prior judicial
experience.
H4: Female justices are less likely to receive the majority opinion assignment than
male justices.
H5: Minority justices are less likely to receive the majority opinion assignment than
non-minority justices.
While research suggests that female and minority judges might be subject to negative
stereotypes, research also indicates that stereotypes of competence may be context-
dependent. For example, when society deems a role “female,” the public tends to view
female political candidates as more competent in that role (Huddy and Terkildsen
1993). In the judicial context, women’s status as judges might be elevated in the eyes
of their peers when deciding certain issues. Previous work points to this very

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
possibility. In her exploration of circuit judge sexual harassment and discrimination
decisions, Peresie (2005, 1778), for example, demonstrates “that … male judges were
more likely to find for plaintiffs when at least one female judge was on the panel.” One
argument for this finding, she suggests, is tied to the idea of “deference” (Peresie 2005,
1783). Namely, she notes “that male judges” might “defer to female judges because
male judges view them as more credible and persuasive in gender-coded cases, based
on their viewpoints, past experiences, or gender alone” (Peresie 2005, 1783).
This sort of phenomena may not be unique to the status characteristic of gender and
cases involving “women’s issues.” It could also influence perceptions of minority
justices in a subset of cases as well. If female justices are perceived as especially
competent to write majority opinions in cases raising “women’s issues,” and minority
justices are perceived as highly qualified to write opinions in cases raising issues
deemed salient for minorities, judges’ status as women and minorities, respectively,
might increase their likelihood of receiving the assignment in those cases. However, if
gender and race are associated with decreases in “perceived expertise” (see Bunderson
2003, 561), these perceptions may be magnified in more complex cases. We thus offer
three additional hypotheses:
H6: Female justices are more likely to receive the majority opinion assignment than
male justices in cases raising women’s issues.
H7: Minority justices are more likely to receive the majority opinion assignment than
nonminority justices in cases involving race issues.
H8: Female and minority justices are less likely to receive the majority opinion
assignment than male, non-minority justices in complex cases.

Finally, when examining the influence of status characteristics, it is important to
consider that individual status characteristics may interact and affect perceptions and
behavior in more complicated ways. To this end, we also consider “intersectionality
theory” (see Hancock 2007, 65). This line of theory offers “a conceptual space through
which to study how various oppressions work together to produce something unique
and distinct from any one form of discrimination standing alone” (Dhamoon 2011,
231). In other words, we should not assume that all African Americans think, behave,
and are treated the same way; the experiences and thoughts of an African American
woman may differ from those of a white woman and an African American man.
Recent research on judging, for example, has considered the effects that both race and
gender might have on individual judge behavior (Collins and Moyer 2008; Szmer,
Christensen, and Kaheny 2015). Unfortunately, we cannot fully analyze the
intersectional effect of these particular traits due to the low number of women who are
racial minorities on the bench during the time period of our study (1995–1998).
However, while often left out of the intersectionality discussion (Cho, Crenshaw, and
McCall 2013), age would seem to be a prime candidate for inclusion as another
category that interacts with factors like race and gender (Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and
Kramer 1998).
Surprisingly understudied (Nelson 2002), age – like race and gender – is one of the
primary categories we use to discriminate, in part, because it is relatively easy to
discern (Fiske 1998). Consistent with studies of the general public (Cuddy and Fiske
2002), older justices might find themselves subject to age-based perceptions of
competence. As Rosalind Barnett (2005, 26) maintains, “In the United States, aging is
viewed primarily in terms of decline: As age increases, it is widely believed, mental

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
capacities weaken, reflexes slow, drive diminishes, ambition wanes.” From an
intersectional perspective, factors like gender may condition the effects of age. Barnett
(2005), for example, suggests age does not always work against male individuals. As
she notes:
While the stereotype of decline is generally applied to men as well as women, there are
notable exceptions. With age, men who have achieved success in male professions are
seen as having grown in skill and wisdom. … In contrast, as women age, those who
have been successful in such predominantly female professions as teaching are often
seen as old-fashioned and behind the times. (Barnett 2005, 26)
While women are increasingly participating as lawyers and judges in the United States,
women were traditionally restricted from the legal profession. The profession has,
therefore, been dominated by males in the US. With this in mind, age may
differentially affect the experiences of male and female justices. Older women might
be less likely to receive a majority opinion assignment than younger female justices,
but older male justices may not necessarily be subject to negative, ageist assumptions,
or the severity of such stereotypes may be mitigated. In fact, the historical composition
of the legal profession, including the judiciary, suggests that male justices’ advanced
age may actually produce assumptions of even greater judicial competence and
prestige, leading to increases in the likelihood of their receiving a majority opinion
assignment. Considering that state supreme court benches were largely staffed by male
justices during the time period under study, we hypothesize that:
H9: Increases in a justice’s age, on average, should be associated with an increased
likelihood of receiving the majority opinion assignment.

However, gender and race may also interact with age to affect perceptions of
competence. Whereas we expect older, non-minority males to be advantaged in terms
of receiving assignments as they age, this may not apply to female and minority, male
justices. The intersectionality of age, gender, and race thus leads to the following
hypotheses:
H10: As female justices age, they will be less likely to receive the majority opinion
than male justices.
H11: As minority justices age, they will be less likely to receive the majority opinion
than nonminority justices.
Data and methods
Data for this study are drawn from the Brace and Hall State Supreme Court Data
Project, which includes the universe of published state supreme court decisions for the
1995–1998 calendar years.1 This time period was chosen for multiple reasons. First,
our study builds on previous work examining state supreme court assignment practices,
especially that of Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch (2012), which also employed this
dataset. Like our study, they consider the role of gender, race, and age in state supreme
court opinion assignment in the 1995–1998 period. However, Christensen, Szmer, and
Stritch (2012) did not assess how the influence of age may be conditioned on judge
gender and race. As theorized earlier, however, status characteristics, like gender, race,
and age can operate in more nuanced ways as clearly seen in work exploring
intersectionality. Thus, when we can, we ought to consider status characteristics in a
joint matter.
Second, race or gender-based perceptions of a colleague’s competence or expertise
may be tied to the substantive issue raised in the task at hand and its difficulty or
complexity, neither of which was assessed in the Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
(2012) study. These case-based considerations are critical tests of the role of status
characteristics on majority opinion assignment and, importantly, the Brace and Hall
dataset permits construction of a Women’s Issue and Race Issue variable. Both
variables are necessary to test the possible relationships between the assignment
decision and the major issue raised in the case as we do here.
While the study’s time period does not permit an assessment of the effects of changing
levels of bench diversity since the 1998 period, it does allow for a more direct
comparison to earlier work (e.g., Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch 2012) on this topic,
while extending it in significant ways. And, of course, it provides an important point of
departure for future studies investigating the effects, if any, of compositional changes
on these benches with respect to majority opinion assignment by providing a
theoretical and empirical foundation for such work.
In this study, we limit our analysis to fourteen state courts of last resort where the
opinion assignment is the discretionary choice of a single justice.2 The choice to focus
on systems employing discretionary assignment as opposed to or in addition to those
employing rotation or random assignment is guided by our theory, which suggests that
individual choices to distribute assignments may be conditioned on perceptions of
competence. Thus, it makes sense to focus our analysis on those regimes in which a
presiding judge has a choice in distributing this task. The unit of analysis is the
justice’s participation in the majority coalition in a case, because we are primarily
concerned with judge-level characteristics like gender, race, and age, and the opinion is
almost always assigned to justices in the majority coalition.3 Our dependent variable
(Majority Opinion Assignment) is coded ‘1’ if the justice wrote the opinion of the

court and ‘0’ otherwise. As such, per curiam opinions are excluded from the estimation
sample.
Our data offer a variety of methodological challenges. For example, we are examining
data grouped within courts and panels. Surely, the institutional variations across state
courts of last resort will result in errors that are not independent within courts. Perhaps
more concerning, the choice to assign the opinion to one judge on a panel is clearly not
independent of the other co-panelists in the majority coalition. Therefore, we have to
utilize an estimation technique that corrects for the consequences of the within-group
interdependence, or we risk inflating standard errors, thereby increasing the likelihood
of a Type I error (Arceneaux and Nickerson 2009).
While no perfect estimation technique exists to account for the consequences of
withinunit interdependence, most methods usually produce similar estimated standard
errors (Arceneaux and Nickerson 2009).4 We follow Maltzman and Wahlbeck (2004)
and use a random effects estimator, because that method explicitly allows us to account
for the within-case correlated errors. However, they only examined one court – the US
Supreme Court – so they did not have to account for clusters of data within different
courts. Since we have 14 different courts, we also include court-level fixed effects.
Therefore, while Maltzman and Wahlbeck (2004) employed random effects probit, we
utilize random effects logit, because its estimates are not biased when fixed effects are
included in the model (Cameron and Trivedi 2010).
Our variables of interest involve select experiential, educational, and demographic
background characteristics, or traits, of the individual justices. Previous work in this
area, for example, suggests majority opinion assignment processes might be influenced
by “specific status cues” (Bunderson 2003, 561), including judicial experience and

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
educational background (Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch 2012). To control for the role
that these factors might play, we include three important variables: Judicial Tenure,
Previous Judicial Experience, and Law School Prestige. The first is the difference in
the number of years the justice has been on the state supreme court at the time of the
decision from the tenure score of the median justice on the majority coalition. Previous
Judicial Experience is a simple dummy variable, coded ‘1’ if the state supreme court
judge had previous judicial experience and ‘0’ if their first judicial role was their
service on the state high court. Like those before us, we hypothesize that justices with
more experience (or previous experience) will be perceived as more competent and,
hence, will be more likely to be given the majority opinion assignment.5 Lastly, Law
School Prestige is a dummy variable, coded ‘1’ if the judge attended an “elite” law
program as defined by Slotnick (1983, 574) and ‘0’ otherwise. As with tenure, we
anticipate a positive relationship. However, as with tenure, we attempt to control for
the traits of the judge’s panelists on the majority coalition as well. While we
accomplish this with a difference measure in our assessment of justice tenure, with our
measures of previous judgeship experience and schooling, we include two additional
variables: Panel Previous Judgeship and Panel Law School Prestige. These last two
measures are simple counts of the number of other panelists in the majority coalition
who had previous judicial experience and the number of other panelists in the majority
coalition who graduated from an elite law school, respectively. Because increases in
these two measures might make a judge’s own background less significant in
determining his or her own chances of getting the majority opinion assignment, we
anticipate negative signs on these particular coefficients. Information on the judge’s

appointment year, previous judicial experience, and law school background were
derived from a dataset of state supreme court judge attributes developed by Professor
Chris Bonneau (see Bonneau, Brace, and Arceneaux 2005–2006).
As noted above, we are particularly interested in assessing the role of “diffuse status
cues” (Bunderson 2003, 561). We hypothesize that female and minority justices might
be less likely, on average, to receive majority opinion assignments when part of the
majority coalition. We thus include two dummy variables, Female Justice and African
American Justice.6 Female state supreme court justices are coded ‘1,’ while male
justices are coded ‘0.’ African American justices take on the value of ‘1,’ while non-
minority justices are coded ‘0.’ Because a female or African American justice’s
likelihood of getting the assignment might be influenced by the diversity of the
coalition, we did include two additional variables assessing the number of other
women (Panel Gender) and the number of other African Americans (Panel African
Americans) on the majority coalition, though we do not assert a hypothesized
directionality with respect to either measure. In addition, as most of the justices in the
dataset are males, we expected age to be an advantage for most in this study. In our
basic model and those testing for issue type and case complexity interactions, Justice
Age is measured as the difference in the age of the justice at the time of the decision to
that of the median justice on the majority coalition. In the intersectionality model,
however, Justice Age is simply the justice’s age at the time of the decision, a choice
guided by our theoretical framework.
As noted earlier, the influence of both justice gender and race in majority opinion
assignment may depend, in part, on other factors, including the issue raised in the case
and case complexity. First, we hypothesize that the assigner would be more likely to

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
give the task to female justices if the case involved a perceived “women’s issue.”
African American justices, we surmised, might be more likely to receive the
assignment if the case involved a perceived “race issue.” Thus, we include two issue
variables, Women’s Issue and Race Issue and include those variables in multiplicative
terms with Female Justice (i.e., Female Justice x Women’s Issue) and African
American Justice (i.e., African American Justice x Race Issue). Our Women’s Issue
variable is modeled after Segal’s (2000) operationalization and, specifically, is coded
‘1’ if the case raised an issue pertaining to abortion, sex discrimination in employment,
adoption, child support, paternity, guardianship, aid to parochial schools, crimes
against family and children, and kidnapping. The operationalization of Race Issue
relies on Segal (2000) as well as Bonneau and Rice (2009). Following Segal (2000,
143), our Race Issue variable is coded ‘1’ if the case pertained to “race discrimination,
voting rights, school desegregation, and affirmative action.” Following Bonneau and
Rice (2009, 394), we extend this operationalization to criminal procedural issues, death
penalty issues, and “cases involving drug offenses” due to concerns regarding
discrimination against African Americans in these areas. Thus, if the case raises any of
these matters, Race Issue is coded
‘1.’ Otherwise, the variable is coded ‘0.’
In addition, the influence of judge gender and race may be conditioned on the
complexity of a given case. To test for possible conditional relationships between these
variables, we include two multiplicative terms – Female Justice x Case Complexity and
African American Justice x Case Complexity. Our measure of Case Complexity is
based on work conducted by Hettinger, Lindquist, and Martinek (2006, 59) and,

specifically, is a scaled measure (using principal components factor analysis),
combining whether the case involved a cross appeal along with the number of issues
raised in the case. Presumably, cases in which both parties are appealing some issue in
the case and those that involve more than one substantive issue present judges with a
more complex choice situation (Hettinger, Lindquist, and Martinek 2006, 59).
Finally, we must account for the role of ideological influences and workload
considerations as controls in the models (Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2004; Maltzman,
Spriggs, and Wahlbeck 2000; Spaeth 1983). First, if the justice is in the position to
make the assignment, the justice may seek to self-assign a case so as to more directly
control the policy output of the court (Brenner 1993). To evaluate this potential
tendency, we include a dummy variable, Majority Opinion Assigner, coded ‘1’ if the
justice was the assumed majority opinion assigner in the case and ‘0’ otherwise.7 If the
assigning justice does not opt to give the opinion to himself or herself, ideological
concerns might lead the justice to entrust the opinion to a close colleague on the
ideological spectrum. Thus, as a control, we assess the ideological distance between
the judge and the majority opinion assigner in the same case, assuming that an increase
in the variable, Ideological Distance, will be associated with a decrease in the
likelihood the judge will receive the opinion. To measure state supreme court justice
ideology (and, hence, for the construction of this distance measure), we turn to the state
supreme court justice ideology scores developed by Bonica and Woodruff (2015).
In addition, we control for workload. If a justice is already consumed with a relatively
large number of assignments, the assigner might very well look elsewhere so as to
more fairly distribute workload on the court. To capture this behavior, we include the
variable, Justice Workload. We constructed the measure by first calculating the amount

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
of majority opinions each judge on the court authored during the prior month. We then
subtracted the median number of opinions for the month from the specific judge’s
total. To create the measure employed in the study, however, we considered the
workload of the justice’s peers on the majority coalition and hence, took the difference
between the individual justice’s workload score from the median workload value on
the given majority coalition. Increases in this difference measure should correlate with
decreases in the likelihood that a judge receives the assignment.
Utilizing random effects logistic regression (with fixed effects for the distinct (state)
courts), we proceed with a basic model, testing the role of experience/educational
attributes along with gender, race, and age on opinion assignment. Subsequent models
consider the conditional influences of the issue raised in the case, case complexity, and
the intersectionality of select judge attributes. We report descriptive statistics in Table
1.8
Results
The results of the basic random effects logit model are presented in Table 2. Beginning
with a few key control variables (which perform in a like manner across all of our
Table 1. Descriptive statistics for variables of interest.
Variable
Mean
Standard
deviation
Min,
max
Female Justice
0.152
0.359
0, 1
African American Justice
0.063
0.242
0, 1
African American Female
0.006
0.076
0, 1
White Female
0.146
0.353
0, 1

African American Male
0.057
0.231
0, 1
White Male
0.791
0.406
0, 1
Women’s Issue
0.079
0.269
0, 1
Race Issue
0.339
0.474
0, 1
Case Complexity
0.282
6.805
−0.895,
297.157
Majority Opinion Assigner
0.193
0.394
0, 1
Ideological Distance
0.616
0.624
0, 2.638
Law School Prestige
0.367
0.482
0, 1
Justice Prior Judgeship
0.682
0.466
0, 1
Justice Age
60.400
6.928
41, 74
Justice Age (Difference from the
Median)
−0.958
6.418
−26,
21.5
Justice Tenure (Difference from
the Median)
−0.108
0.762
−2.833,
2.395
Justice Workload (Difference
from the Median)
−0.184
1.417
−18.5,
5
Panel Law School Prestige
1.691
1.854
0, 6
Panel Previous Judgeship
3.495
1.667
0, 7
Panel African Americans
0.303
0.461
0, 2
Panel Gender
0.816
0.696
0, 3
analyses), we find, as expected, that judicial workload plays a relevant role in opinion
assignment. Justice Workload is negatively signed as anticipated and is statistically
significant, suggesting that a justice is less likely to receive the assignment in a given

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
case with increases in his or her prior assignments (in relation to the workload of the
median member of the majority coalition). We also see a strong tendency for justices to
selfassign majority opinions. Third, while we anticipated that increases in ideological
distance from the assigner would be associated with a lower likelihood of receiving the
opinion in a given case, the coefficient on the ideological distance measure was
positive in this model and, in fact, reached statistical significance in this direction.
Therefore, justices who are ideologically further from the assigner in a given case are
more likely to receive the assignment. One explanation is that an assigner is seeking to
maintain a majority coalition and, thus, the assigner may opt to select an author more
on the periphery of a given coalition (see Rohde 1972). However, another possible
explanation for this finding is that perceptions of expertise might weigh more heavily
on the minds of assigning justices than ideological proximity (Lax and Cameron 2007).
In our basic model, we found some support for the idea that status characteristics
influence these assignments. Beginning with our examination of “specific status cues”
(Bunderson 2003, 561), we hypothesized that justices with longer (relative) tenures,
those with previous judicial experience, and those who graduated from highly-ranked
law schools might be more likely to author the majority opinion. Interestingly,
however, justices with longer relative tenures to those on the majority coalition and
those with previous judgeships were less likely to receive the assignment. Meanwhile,
there was no apparent relationship between an individual justice’s law school
background and the likelihood of receiving the assignment. That said, variables tapping
the number of other panelists in the majority who had graduated from a prestigious law
school or who had previously served as a judge yielded expected results. Namely, a

judge’s chances of being given the majority opinion assignment decreased when the
majority coalition had
Table 2. Random effects logit with state fixed effects (not reported) of State Supreme
Court opinion assignment, 1995–1998.
Independent variable
Coefficient
Discrete change
Percent
change
Female Justice
0.162#
(0.061)
0.02
13.76
African American Justice
−0.006
(0.092)
Majority Opinion
Assigner
0.164**
(0.051)
0.02
14.07
Ideological Distance
0.070*
(0.033)
0.01
7.27
Law School Prestige
0.058 (0.054)
Justice Prior Judgeship
−0.195#
(0.046)
−0.03
−14.77
Justice Age
0.017***
(0.003)
0.03
18.91
Justice Tenure
−0.105#
(0.026)
−0.02
−12.06
Justice Workload
−0.022*
(0.011)
−0.01
−4.99
Panel African Americans
0.047 (0.067)

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Panel Gender
0.010 (0.043)
Panel Law School
Prestige
−0.207***
(0.027)
−0.11
−45.62
Panel Previous Judgeship
−0.196***
(0.024)
−0.09
−41.25
Constant
−1.044***
(0.074)
N
25,474
AIC
23,376.13
Note: Standard errors in parentheses.
+ p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001; # p < 0.05 but the coefficient is not
in the posited direction.
Discrete changes are differences in the probability a justice will receive the assignment
to write the opinion (i.e., Pr(Y = 1)) for two important values (1 and 0 for dichotomous
variables; one standard deviation above and below the mean for continuous variables)
of the independent variable, averaged over all observed values of the covariates (see
Hanmer and Kalkan 2013). Percent changes are calculated using the following
formula: 100× (discrete change/Pr(Y = 1|X = lower value)).
additional members who shared these status characteristics. Thus, perhaps the
unanticipated finding on the tenure variable is due to a burnout effect.
Likewise, the model yielded some significant findings with respect to “diffuse status
cues” (Bunderson 2003, 561) including justice gender and age, but the former was not
in the expected direction. While we hypothesized that female justices would be less

likely to receive majority opinion assignments, the coefficient on the relevant variable
was positive and statistically significant in the positive direction. In viewing the
percentage changes, female justices were nearly 14 percent more likely to receive the
assignment than male peers, an influence that is comparable to that of self-assignment
tendencies. Second, since most of the justices examined in this dataset are male, and
negative stereotypes in terms of job competence and advanced age may not apply to
these justices, we anticipated that increases in the age of the justice will correspond
with an increased likelihood in being assigned to write the majority opinion. We find
strong support for this hypothesis (see Table 2). Increasing justice age from one
standard deviation below the mean to one standard deviation above the mean produces
a nearly 19 percent change in the likelihood the judge will write the majority opinion,
which exceeds the influence of self-assignment tendencies.9 African American
justices, meanwhile, were no more or less likely to receive the assignment than white
males on the court in this basic model. As seen in Table 2, the African American
justice variable, while negatively signed, was not statistically significant.
We also hypothesized that the influence of gender and race might vary depending on
the type of issue before the court and that, in some cases, these status cues may signal
greater competence. To this end, along with the other variables in our basic model, we
present multiplicative terms in the first column of Table 3, whereby we examine
whether the impact of justice gender and race is conditioned upon whether the court
was hearing a “women’s issue” or a “race issue,” respectively. The presence of these
issues, we hypothesized, might yield increases in the likelihood that a woman or an
African American justice might receive the assignment.

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Importantly, we found some support for our hypotheses that the issue in a given case
operates in the manner we anticipated with respect to the “diffuse” (Bunderson 2003,
561) traits examined; however, support was only found as it pertained to our
examination of case issue and justice gender. In non-women’s issue cases, women are
still more likely to receive the assignment than men. The difference in this probability,
however, is small. The average probability a female judge will receive the assignment
is 0.020 greater than the average probability a male judge will receive the assignment,
a difference that is statistically significant at the 0.05 level.
If a female justice is in the majority in a case raising a “women’s issue,” she is also
significantly more likely to be assigned the majority opinion than her male peers. As
seen in the first column of Table 3, the coefficient for the multiplicative term (Female
Justice x Women’s Issue) is positive and significant, as expected. We also found that,
in women’s issues, the average predicted probability of a woman receiving the
assignment is 0.082 greater than the corresponding value for her male peers.
Conversely, in non-women’s issues cases, women are only 0.02 more likely to receive
the majority opinion assignment. The difference between those two values – 0.062 – is
statistically significant at the 0.01 level.
We did not find similar support for the comparable test with respect to justice race in
cases involving what were operationalized as “race issues.” The coefficient of the
relevant multiplicative term testing this proposition was not statistically significant.
We also hypothesized that if justice gender and race operate to depress notions of
judicial competence, their negative effects might be heightened in more complex cases
and, hence, we included these traits in two multiplicative terms with Case Complexity.

We see support for our hypotheses as they pertain to both gender and race as reported
in the second column of Table 3.
Female justices are less likely to be selected to write the majority opinion in cases of
increasing complexity. The multiplicative term, Female Justice x Case Complexity, is
negatively signed, as expected. Moreover, as seen in Figure 1, discrete changes
associated with this variable are positive and significant at very low levels of case
complexity, become insignificant for moderate values of complexity, and turn negative
and statistically significant at high levels of case complexity. In other words, women
are much more likely to receive the assignment in easy cases, while men are even more
likely to write the opinion in the most complex cases. In addition, the sign on the
relevant term testing the interaction between race and case complexity was negatively
signed as hypothesized,
Table 3. Case-type interaction effect models, random effects logit with state fixed
effects (not reported) of State Supreme Court opinion assignment, 1995–1998.
Independent variable
Coefficient
Issue area
Case
complexity
Female Justice
0.133#
(0.062)
0.165#
(0.061)
Women’s Issue
−0.065
(0.068)
Female Justice × Women’s Issue
0.384*
(0.171)
African American Justice
−0.019
−0.007

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
(0.105)
(0.092)
Race Issue
0.010
(0.037)
African American Justice × Race
Issue
0.031
(0.160)
Female Justice × Case
Complexity
–
−0.130**
(0.044)
African American Justice × Case
Complexity
–
−0.109+
(0.076)
Case Complexity
–
−0.001
(0.003)
Majority Opinion Assigner
0.165***
(0.051)
0.166***
(0.051)
Ideological Distance
0.070*
(0.033)
0.071*
(0.033)
Law School Prestige
0.058
(0.054)
0.050 (0.054)
Justice Prior Judgeship
−0.194#
(0.046)
−0.200#
(0.046)
Justice Age
0.017***
(0.003)
0.017***
(0.003)
Justice Tenure
−0.105#
(0.026)
−0.105#
(0.027)

Justice Workload
−0.022*
(0.011)
−0.023*
(0.011)
Panel African Americans
0.045
(0.067)
0.048 (0.067)
Panel Gender
0.010
(0.043)
0.011 (0.043)
Panel Law School Prestige
−0.207***
(0.027)
−0.206***
(0.027)
Panel Previous Judgeship
−0.196***
−0.199***
(0.024)
(0.024)
Constant
−1.038***
(0.076)
−1.038***
(0.074)
N
25,474
25,467
AIC
23,379.14
23,361.31
Notes: Standard errors in parentheses.
+ p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001; # p < 0.05 but the coefficient is not
in the posited direction.
and it did reach significance at the 0.1 level. While African American justices are no
more or less likely to receive the majority opinion assignment than non-minority
justices in non-complex and moderately complex cases, as case complexity grows, a
judge’s race seems to have a more negative influence on one’s prospects of getting the
majority opinion assignment (see Figure 2).
Our study also explores how gender, race, and age may interact to influence majority
opinion assignments as suggested by theories of intersectionality. In Table 4, Justice

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Age assesses the effect of age on the assignment prospects of white males. The
likelihood of
Figure 1. Justice gender discrete changes by case complexity. Marginal effects are
equal to the difference in the average predicted probability the judge will receive the
assignment (i.e., Y = 1) when the independent variable is equal to one (i.e., the justice
is a woman) and zero (i.e., the justice is a man).
a white male justice being selected to write the majority opinion increases significantly
with advances in his age. White female justices and African American male justices,
on the other hand, are less likely to receive majority opinion assignments as they age.
The relevant multiplicative terms give indication of the negative relationships in the
model, as both are negatively signed and statistically significant, as expected.
However, the nature of these relationships is best assessed graphically across multiple
values of justice age. To this end, we present Figures 3 and 4.
Figure 3 plots the discrete changes associated with justice gender across the values of
justice age in the sample, averaged over all observed values of the covariates (see

Figure 2. Justice race discrete changes by case complexity. Marginal effects are equal
to the difference in the average predicted probability the judge will receive the
assignment (i.e., Y = 1) when the independent variable is equal to one (i.e., the justice
is an African American) and zero (i.e., the justice is a non-minority).
Table 4. Intersectionality, random effects logit with state fixed effects (not reported) of
State Supreme Court opinion assignment, 1995–1998.
Coefficient
Independent Variables
All cases
Female Justice
0.896*
(0.388)
Justice Age
0.020***
(0.004)
Female Justice × Justice Age
−0.012*
(0.007)
African American Justice
1.717*
(0.725)

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
African American Justice × Justice
Age
−0.030**
(0.012)
Majority Opinion Assigner
0.177***
(0.051)
Ideological Distance
0.071**
(0.033)
Law School Prestige
0.073
(0.055)
Justice Prior Judgeship
−0.173#
(0.047)
Justice Tenure
−0.100#
(0.026)
Justice Workload
−0.024*
(0.011)
Panel African Americans
0.042
(0.067)
Panel Gender
0.042
(0.043)
Panel Law School Prestige
−0.214***
(0.027)
Panel Previous Judgeship
−0.195***
(0.024)
Constant
−2.313***

(0.244)
N
25,325
AIC
23,213.33
Notes: Standard errors in parentheses.
+ p < 0.10, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001; # p < 0.05 but the coefficient is not
in the posited direction.
Estimation sample does not include the one African American female justice in the
larger sample.
Hanmer and Kalkan 2013). As seen in the figure, there is a clear downward trend in a
woman’s likelihood of receiving the majority opinion assignment as she ages, though
after a certain age, the confidence intervals encompass the value of zero and, hence, are
not statistically significant. Remarkably, the discrete changes are highly significant for
a particularly prime period of a female justice’s career. From around forty years of age
to her early sixties, a female justice will be less likely to be given the majority opinion
assignment with each additional year in age relative to her male peers. Overall, though,
the graph suggests the gender gap disappears for older judges.
Similarly, as seen in Figure 4, the trend line for African American justices is negatively
sloped as well. However, the interaction of justice age and race is distinct in some
ways from that of justice age and gender. Like their female colleagues, the confidence
intervals of the predicted marginal effects do not contain the value of zero for African
American

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Figure 3. Justice gender discrete changes by justice age. Marginal effects are equal to
the difference in the average predicted probability the judge will receive the
assignment (i.e., Y = 1) when the independent variable is equal to one (i.e., the justice
is a woman) and zero (i.e., the justice is a man).
justices in their early to mid-forties. However, from their late forties to the earlier part
of their sixties, African American justices are no more or less likely to receive the
assignment than are non-minority male justices with increases in age. Around their
mid-sixties, though, African American justices, again become significantly less likely
to receive the majority opinion assignment with each year in age. This analysis adds
further support to the idea that justice gender, race, and age may operate in far more
complicated ways, and that the impact of age itself may depend on whether one is
considering the status characteristic of gender or race.

Figure 4. Justice race discrete changes by justice age. Marginal effects are equal to the
difference in the average predicted probability the judge will receive the assignment
(i.e., Y = 1) when the independent variable is equal to one (i.e., the justice is an African
American) and zero (i.e., the justice is a nonminority).
Discussion
Considering the impact that majority opinions have on policy and legal development, it
makes sense to analyze those factors that influence opinion assignment. While
previous work has certainly explored majority opinion assignment decisions, it has not
fully investigated the effects of individual diversity on these processes. We take the
examination of demographic and background traits of individual justices further than
previous work by assessing their more nuanced influence. Namely, we examine the
impact of a justice’s gender and race on opinion assignment and consider whether
stereotypes of competence associated with these traits enhance a judge’s likelihood of
getting to shape the policy content of opinions in certain types of cases (i.e., those
raising issue areas salient to judge gender or race) but decrease the judge’s framing
powers in other types of cases (i.e. complex cases). Insofar as previous work suggests
that assigners may consider quality of output in task allocation of this sort (e.g., Lax
and Cameron 2007), we seek to assess the relative weight given to key indicators of

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
judicial quality, including those rooted in stereotypical assumptions. Our analyses,
moreover, explore these dynamics in state courts of last resort, which are increasingly
important policy-making arenas.
By way of a body of work highlighting “status characteristics theory” (Bunderson
2003, 560–561), we anticipated that female and minority justices on state supreme
courts would be less likely to be assigned to write the majority opinion, on average,
than their male, nonminority peers. We predicted, however, that both gender and race
may interact with the type of issue raised in the case, such that both women and
African American justices would be more likely to be selected to write the opinion in
cases raising “women’s issues” and “race issues,” respectively.
We found partial support for our expectations in this respect. African American
justices, in our basic model, were no more or less likely to be selected to write the
majority opinion. They were no more or less likely, moreover, to write the opinion in
cases raising what we operationalized to be “race issues.” Female justices, on the other
hand, were more likely to author the opinion of the court than their male colleagues in
a basic assignment model, and they were even more likely to get the assignment if the
case raised a “women’s issue.”
This study, however, suggests that a justice’s gender can still lead to perceptions of
lower competence, and this is most notably seen in the model in which justice gender
was conditioned on case complexity. As seen in that analysis, female justices were less
likely to be selected to write the opinion if the matter was complex. In other words, the
initial finding without the complexity interaction – overall, women are more likely to
receive the opinion assignment – is not a counter-theoretical finding that women are

generally perceived by the assigner as more competent. Instead, consistent with our
theory, the complexity interaction effects indicate assigners likely perceive men as
more capable and, therefore, are more inclined to delegate the most difficult cases to
them, while assigning easier tasks to female colleagues. And while our basic model
suggested no difference between African American and non-minority justices in their
assignment tendencies, and while our multiplicative term involving justice race and
issue in the case was not significant, the interaction between a judge’s race and case
complexity reached statistical significance and was notably important in the upper-
range of complex cases.
This study also sheds light on the role of intersectionality in this part of the judicial
process. Though state supreme court benches were not diverse enough to explore the
experiences of African American women on the bench during the period under study,
we were able to test hypotheses exploring the differential effects of age across justice
gender and race. The results were remarkable. Both women and African American
justices were less likely to be selected to write the majority opinion as they got older
(though at distinct age ranges), while their non-minority, male peers were selected for
this task at higher rates with advances in age. The findings underscore the complicated
ways in which status characteristics are evaluated among judicial colleagues.
Of course, future research on gender and race effects in these courts needs to be
undertaken across a broader and more recent time frame for multiple reasons. First,
while approximately 15% of the judges in our estimation dataset were female, only
about 6.5% of the judges in our dataset were African American. This fairly small
percentage of African American judges in our estimation dataset could explain why
some of our race findings were non-significant. That said, the fact that the study

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
produced two significant results suggesting race effects (one with respect to complex
cases and the other, in the course of investigating an interaction between race and age)
is surprising under the circumstances. The question thus remains whether these results
would be even stronger with more minority judges present in the dataset.
However, the question also remains whether increases in diversity, which would likely
be revealed by way of a dataset over a broader and more recent time period, might alter
the experiences of women and minorities on the bench. Perhaps the collaborative
experiences afforded by a more diverse bench over time have altered and, possibly,
minimized the operation of stereotypes pursuant to intergroup contact theory
(Pettigrew 1998). Future studies might also leverage increases in diversity to attempt
further assessments of other racial groups and additional analyses of intersectionality.
That said, the present study provides important evidence that a justice’s gender or race
may influence whether the justice receives a majority opinion assignment and does
suggest that certain case factors might condition this effect. Future studies will need to
consider the issue raised in the case and case complexity when studying the effects of
gender and race on opinion assignment. And while one might surmise that increases in
the number of minority and women jurists on state benches could mitigate the
operation of stereotypes, the distribution of judges across different age groups is
potentially more durable. It is quite possible that the impact of age on opinion
assignment will still be revealed in a conditional way, even on a more diverse bench.
Notes
1. The Brace and Hall State Supreme Court Dataset, an existing National Science
Foundation(NSF) dataset, covers the time period, 1995-1998. As it includes the

universe of state supreme court decisions in this time period, the data has been widely
employed in the published literature (see, e.g., Bonneau and Rice 2009; Brace, Yates,
and Boyea 2012; Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch 2012; Hall 2014; Randazzo,
Waterman, and Fix 2011; Shepherd 2009; Szmer, Christensen, and Kaheny 2015).
2. These states are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii,
Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania,
and Wyoming. They either follow the US Supreme Court procedure (the chief justice
assigns the opinion if she is in the majority; if not, the senior judge in the majority
makes the assignment), or the chief justice always makes the assignment (Hall 1990).
We relied upon Hall’s (1990) categorization of assignment regimes, based on the
results of a phone survey of all 50 state courts of last resort, to identify state supreme
courts that utilize discretionary (as opposed to random or rotating) assignment
processes. As part of a recent study, Hughes, Wilhelm, and Vining (2015) surveyed
state courts to see whether they had altered assignment procedures since 1990.
Unfortunately, Hughes and colleagues did not identify when changes in opinion
assignment methodology were made. We chose to rely on the Hall (1990) study,
because the data was collected from 1988-1989, which is much closer to the time
period we analyzed - 1995 to 1998. However, when examining Hughes, Wilhelm,
and Vining’s (2015) results, the states we included in the analyses have retained
some form of discretionary assignment. In addition, they report that the Tennessee
Supreme Court now utilizes discretionary opinion assignment (Hughes, Wilhelm,
and Vining 2015). To be conservative, we do not include Tennessee in our study as
it is unclear when its assignment procedure changed.

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
3. We thus exclude observations when a justice casts a dissenting vote to account for
this tendency. In addition, as a robustness check, we ran the models for only those
situations in which there was a woman or an African American justice in the majority
coalition. The substantive results of these auxiliary analyses were generally the same
as those we report in the tables below. The one exception is the replication of the
model that includes Case Complexity (Table 3). While the stand-alone coefficient
for Female Justice is significant at the 0.05 level in the presented model, in our robust
check, it is only significant at the 0.056 level. Of course, since that model includes
the Female Justice and Case Complexity multiplicative term, and a zero value of
Case Complexity is not conceptually meaningful, the stand-alone coefficient for
Female Justice is not theoretically important.
4. Majority opinion assignment studies have utilized a variety of techniques, including
conditional logit (Farhang, Kastellec, and Wawro 2015), random effects probit
(Maltzman and Wahlbeck 2004), and multinomial logit (Maltzman and Wahlbeck
1996). Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. Conditional logit, for example,
accounts for all courtlevel and case-type influences (Farhang, Kastellec, and Wawro
2015). This approach would minimize the statistical problems caused by these
factors. However, since we are interested in how case-type variables like issue area
and complexity interact with justice demographic characteristics, this approach is
problematic in this context. Moreover, the alternative-specific conditional logit
model essentially requires including a series of multiplicative terms where each
separate choice option is multiplied by each separate covariate. This is unworkable
in our study where we have 108 different options (justices) across courts and cases.

The conditional logit model also assumes the independence of irrelevant alternatives
(IIA)—essentially the choice between assigning the opinion to any two judges must
be independent of any of the other options (Cameron and Trivedi 2010). In the
context of the US Courts of Appeals, random assignment to three-judge panels
mitigates the likelihood of an IIA violation (Farhang, Kastellec, and Wawro 2015).
However, state courts of last resort generally meet en banc—and the majority
coalition is systematically, not randomly, constructed. Other alternatives are equally
problematic. For example, while multinomial logit models do not require the IIA
assumption, like the alternative-specific conditional logit, they practically require a
relatively consistent, small set of choices–not 108 options varying across thousands
of cases and 14 courts.
5. It is also possible that assigners will have a better assessment of a peer’s policy
inclinations with increases in tenure, rendering assignment to more senior colleagues
a more predictable option.
6. While our hypotheses could extend to other minority justices, due to a lack of racial
diversityon the bench during this time period, we explore whether majority
assignment processes differentially affect African American justices in the present
study.
7. As with our determination of those states using discretionary assignment, we relied
on thesurvey results of Hall (1990) to figure out who the likely majority opinion
assigner would be. In her study, she reports whether a given state has the tradition of
allowing either the chief justice (if in the majority coalition) or the senior associate
justice (if the chief justice is among the dissenters) to choose the majority opinion

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
author (see Hall 1990, 210–211). She also reported those states in which this power
is unconditionally given to the chief justice (Hall 1990, 210–211).
8. While our sample size permits statistical examination of both gender and race effects,
it is important to note that our dataset includes the voting records of 16 women and
seven African American judges. This means that about 15% of the judges voting in
the dataset are women, and about 6.5% of the judges are African American. While
small, the percentage of women in the dataset is sufficient to evaluate structural
patterns in the data as they pertain to the influence of justice gender. However, the
small number of African American justices in the dataset may partially explain why
we do not find stronger race effects.
9. Results of auxiliary regressions suggest that possible collinearity between justice age
andtenure is not a concern. The variance inflation factor (VIF) for Justice Age ranges
from 1.83 to 2.53 across the models. The associated VIF for Justice Tenure does not
exceed 1.54 in these same analyses. We also note that multicollinearity was generally
not an issue— with one exception. The number of panelists graduating from an elite
law school did have a VIF close to 10. However, it was still statistically significant
in the posited sign, so it is not problematic.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
Arceneaux, Kevin, and David W. Nickerson. 2009. “Modeling Certainty with
Clustered Data: A Comparison of Methods.” Political Analysis 17 (2): 177–90.
Barnett, Rosalind Chait. 2005. “Ageism and Sexism in the Workplace.” Generations
(San Francisco,

Calif ) 29 (3): 25–30.
Boddery, Scott S., and Jeff Yates. 2014. “Do Policy Messengers Matter? Majority
Opinion Writers as Policy Cues in Public Agreement with Supreme Court
Decisions.” Political Research Quarterly 67 (4): 851–63.
Bonica, Adam, and Michael J. Woodruff. 2015. “A Common-Space Measure of State
Supreme Court Ideology.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 31 (3):
472–98.
Bonneau, Chris W., Paul Brace, and Kevin Arceneaux. 2005–2006. “Collaborative
Research: An Individual-Level State Supreme Court Database.”
doi:10.15139/S3/12080.
Bonneau, Chris W., Thomas H. Hammond, Forrest Maltzman, and Paul J. Wahlbeck.
2007. “Agenda Control, the Median Justice, and the Majority Opinion on the U.S.
Supreme Court.” American Journal of Political Science 51 (4): 890–905.
Bonneau, Chris W., and Heather Marie Rice. 2009. “Impartial Judges? Race,
Institutional Context, and U.S. State Supreme Courts.” State Politics and Policy
Quarterly 9: 381–403.
Bowie, Jennifer Barnes, Donald R. Songer, and John Szmer. 2014. The View from the
Bench and Chambers: Examining Judicial Process and Decision Making on the
U.S. Courts of Appeals. Charlottesville, VA: UVA Press.
Brace, Paul, Jeff Yates, and Brent D. Boyea. 2012. “Judges, Litigants, and the Design
of Courts.” Law & Society Review 46 (3): 497–522.
Brenner, Saul. 1982. “Strategic Choice and Opinion Assignment on the U.S. Supreme
Court: A Reexamination.” The Western Political Quarterly 35 (2): 204–211.

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Brenner, Saul. 1984. “Issue Specialization as a Variable in Opinion Assignment on the
U.S. Supreme Court.” Journal of Politics 46 (4): 1217–1225.
Brenner, Saul. 1993. “The Chief Justices’ Self Assignment of Majority Opinions in
Salient Cases.” The Social Science Journal 30 (2): 143–50.
Brenner, Saul. 2001. “Majority Opinion Assignment in Salient Cases on the U.S.
Supreme Court: Are New Associate Justices Assigned Fewer Opinions?” Justice
System Journal 22 (2): 209–221.
Brenner, Saul, and Timothy M. Hagle. 1996. “Opinion Writing and Acclimation
Effect.” Political Behavior 18 (3): 235–261.
Brenner, Saul, and Harold J. Spaeth. 1986. “Issue Specialization in Majority Opinion
Assignment on the Burger Court.” The Western Political Quarterly 39 (3): 520–
527.
Brenner, Saul, and Harold J. Spaeth. 1988. “Majority Opinion Assignments and the
Maintenance of the Original Coalition on the Warren Court.” American Journal of
Political Science 32 (1): 72–81.
Bunderson, J. Stuart. 2003. “Recognizing and Utilizing Expertise in Work Groups: A
Status Characteristics Perspective.” Administrative Science Quarterly 48 (4):
557–91.
Cameron, A. Colin, and Pravin K. Trivedi. 2010. Microeconometrics Using Stata.
Revised Edition. College Station, TX: STATA Press.
Cheng, E. K. 2008. “Opinion Specialization: Alive and Well in the Federal Appellate
Judiciary.” Judicature 92: 103–105.

Cho, Sumi, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie
McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of
Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38 (4): 785–810.
Christensen, Robert K., John Szmer, and Justin M. Stritch. 2012. “Race and Gender
Bias in Three Administrative Contexts: Impact on Work Assignments in State
Supreme Courts.” Journal of Public Administrative Research 22 (4): 625–648.
Cohen, Jonathan M. 2002. Inside Appellate Courts: The Impact of Court Organization
on Judicial Decision Making in the United States Courts of Appeals. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan
Press.
Collins, Todd, and Laura Moyer. 2008. “Gender, Race, and Intersectionality on the
Federal Appellate Bench.” Political Research Quarterly 61 (2): 219–227.
Cuddy, Amy J.C., and Susan T. Fiske. 2002. “Doddering but Dear: Process, Content,
and Function in Stereotyping of Older Persons.” In Ageism: Stereotyping and
Prejudice Against Older Persons, edited by Todd D. Nelson, 3–26. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Dhamoon, Rita Kaur. 2011. “Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality.”
Political Research Quarterly 64 (1): 230–243.
Farhang, Sean, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Gregory J. Wawro. 2015. “The Politics of
Opinion Assignment and Authorship on the U.S. Court of Appeals: Evidence
from Sexual Harassment Cases.” Journal of Legal Studies 44: S59–S85.
Fiske, Susan T. 1998. “Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination.” In The
Handbook of Social Psychology, Fourth Edition, edited by D. T. Gilbert, S. T.
Fiske, and G. Lindzey, 357–441. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Fraidin, Samuel N., and Andrea B. Hollingshead. 2005. “‘I Know What I’m Doing’:
The Impact of Gender Stereotypes About Expertise on Task Assignments in
Groups.” In Status and Groups (Research on Managing Groups and Teams,
Volume 7), edited by Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt, 121–141. Bingley: Emerald
Group.
Fridkin, Kim L., and Patrick J. Kenney. 2009. “The Role of Gender Stereotypes in
U.S. Senate Campaigns.” Politics and Gender 5: 301–24.
Geolzhauser, Greg. 2011. “Diversifying State Supreme Courts.” Law & Society
Review 45 (3): 761–81.
Gill, Rebecca D., Sylvia Lazos, and Mallory M. Waters. 2011. “Are Judicial
Performance Evaluations Fair to Women and Minorities? A Cautionary Tale from
Clark County, Nevada.” Law & Society Review 45 (3): 731–59.
Haire, Susan Brodie. 2001. “Rating the Ratings of the American Bar Association
Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary.” Justice System Journal 22 (1): 1–
17.
Hall, Melinda Gann. 1990. “Opinion Assignment Procedures and Conference Practices
in State Supreme Courts.” Judicature 73: 209–14.
Hall, Melinda Gann. 2014. “Representation in State Supreme Courts: Evidence from
the Terminal Term.” Political Research Quarterly 67 (2): 335–346.
Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition:
Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm.” Perspectives on Politics 5
(1): 63–79.

Hanmer, Michael J., and Kerem Ozan Kalkan. 2013. “Behind the Curve: Clarifying
the Best Approach to Calculating Predicted Probabilities and Marginal Effects
from Limited Dependent Variable Models.” American Journal of Political Science
57 (1): 263–277.
Haynie, Kerry L. 2002. “The Color of Their Skin or the Content of Their Behavior?
Race and Perceptions of African American Legislators.” Legislative Studies
Quarterly 27: 295–314.
Hettinger, Virginia A., Stefanie A. Lindquist, and Wendy L. Martinek. 2006. Judging
on a Collegial Court: Influences on Federal Appellate Decision-Making.
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
Howard, J. W. 1981. Courts of Appeals in the Federal Judicial System: A Study of the
Second, Fifth, and District of Columbia Circuits. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Huddy, Leonie, and Nayda Terkildsen. 1993. “Gender Stereotypes and the Perception
of Male and Female Candidates.” American Journal of Political Science 37 (1):
119–147.
Hughes, David A., Teena Wilhelm, and Richard L. Vining Jr. 2015. “Deliberation
Rules and Opinion Assignment Procedures in State Supreme Courts: A
Replication.” Justice System Journal 36 (4): 395–410.
Lax, Jeffrey R., and Charles M. Cameron. 2007. “Bargaining and Opinion Assignment
on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 23 (2):
276–302.

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Maltzman, Forrest, James F. Spriggs, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 2000. Crafting Law on
the Supreme Court: The Collegial Game. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Maltzman, Forrest, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 1996. “May It Please the Chief? Opinion
Assignments in the Rehnquist Court.” American Journal of Political Science 40
(2): 421–443.
Maltzman, Forrest, and Paul J. Wahlbeck. 2004. “A Conditional Model of Opinion
Assignment on the Supreme Court.” Political Research Quarterly 57 (4): 551–
563.
McLauchlan, William P. 1972. “Ideology and Conflict in Supreme Court Opinion
Assignment, 1946–1962.” The Western Political Quarterly 25 (1): 16–27.
Nash, Jonathan Remy. 2015. “Expertise and Opinion Assignment on the Courts of
Appeals: A Preliminary Investigation.” Florida Law Review 66 (4): 1599–1684.
Nelson, Todd D., ed. 2002. Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice Against Older
Persons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Peresie, Jennifer L. 2005. “Female Judges Matter: Gender and Collegial
Decisionmaking in the Federal Appellate Courts.” Yale Law Journal 114: 1759–
1790.
Pettigrew, Thomas F. 1998. “Intergroup Contact Theory.” Annual Review of
Psychology 49 (1): 65–85.
Randazzo, Kirk A., Richard W. Waterman, and Michael P. Fix. 2011. “State Supreme
Courts and the Effects of Statutory Constraint: A Test of the Model of Contingent
Discretion.” Political Research Quarterly 64 (4): 779–789.

Rathjen, Gregory James. 1974. “Policy Goals, Strategic Choice, and Majority Opinion
Assignments in the U.S. Supreme Court: A Replication.” American Journal of
Political Science 18 (4): 713–724. Ridgeway, Cecilia L., Yan E. Li, Kristan G.
Erickson, Kristen Backor, and Justine E. Tinkler. 2009. “How Easily Does a
Social Difference Become a Status Distinction? Gender Matters.” American
Sociological Review 74 (1): 44–62.
Rohde, David W. 1972. “Policy Goals, Strategic Choice and Majority Opinion
Assignments in the U.S. Supreme Court.” Midwest Journal of Political Science
16: 652–682.
Segal, Jennifer. 2000. “Representative Decision Making on the Federal Bench:
Clinton’s District Court Appointees.” Political Research Quarterly 53 (1): 137–
50.
Sen, Maya. 2014. “How Judicial Qualification Ratings May Disadvantage Minority
and Female Candidates.” Journal of Law and Courts 2 (1): 33–65.
Shepherd, Joanna M. 2009. “The Influence of Retention Politics on Judges’ Voting.”
The Journal of Legal Studies 38 (1): 169–206.
Sigelman, Carol K., Lee Sigelman, Barbara J. Walkosz, and Michael Nitz. 1995.
“Black Candidates, White Voters: Understanding Racial Bias in Political
Perceptions.” American Journal of Political Science 39: 243–65.
Slotnick, Elliot E. 1979a. “Who Speaks for the Court? Majority Opinion Assignment
from Taft to Burger.” American Journal of Political Science 23 (1): 60–77.
Slotnick, Elliot. 1979b. “Judicial Career Patterns and Majority Opinion Assignment on
the Supreme Court.” Journal of Politics 41 (2): 640–648.

Cite as
Kaheny, E. B., Szmer, J., & Christensen, R. K. (2020). Status characteristics and their
intersectionality: majority opinion assignment in state supreme courts. Politics, Groups,
and Identities, 8(5), 894-917. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2019.1569538
Slotnick, Elliot. 1983. “Federal Trial and Appellate Judges: How Do They Differ?”
Western Political Quarterly 36 (4): 570–578.
Spaeth, Harold J. 1983. “Distributive Justice: Majority Opinion Assignments in the
Burger Court.” Judicature 67: 299–304.
Steffensmeier, Darrell, Jeffery Ulmer, and John Kramer. 1998. “The Interaction of
Race, Gender, and Age in Criminal Sentencing: The Punishment Cost of Being
Young, Black, and Male.” Criminology 36 (4): 763–98.
Szmer, John, Robert K. Christensen, and Erin B. Kaheny. 2015. “Gender, Race, and
Dissensus on State Supreme Courts.” Social Science Quarterly 96 (2): 553–575.
Vining, Richard L., and Teena Wilhelm. 2011. “Measuring Case Salience in State
Courts of Last Resort.” Political Research Quarterly 64 (3): 559–72.
Wagner, David G., and Joseph Berger. 1997. “Gender and Interpersonal Task
Behaviors: Status Expectation Accounts.” Sociological Perspectives 40: 1–32.
Wahlbeck, Paul J. 2006. “Strategy and Constraints on Supreme Court Opinion
Assignment.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154 (6): 1729–1755.
Wahlbeck, Paul J., James F. Spriggs, and Forrest Maltzman. 1998. “Marshalling the
Court: Bargaining and Accommodation on the United States Supreme Court.”
American Journal of Political Science 42 (1): 294–315.