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This analysis seeks to understand the decline of Supreme Court consensual norms often attributed to the failed leadership of Chief Justice Stone. A new unit of analysis—justice-level dissent and concurrence rates—supports an alternative view of observed increases in dissensual decision making. When these measures are estimated with time-series techniques, results offer evidence of multiple changepoints in this norm of the Court that both lead and lag Stone’s elevation. Broader contextual explanations related to the alteration of the Court’s discretionary issue agenda and its ideological and demographic composition also contribute to fractures in the once-unanimous voting coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do newly appointed justices experience acclimation effects upon their ascent to the Supreme Court? We contend that acclimation is a process, as justices' conformation to the doctrine of stare decisis is partly a function of tenure length. We find that precedent conformance is inversely related to tenure, with newcomers following legal precedents at rates significantly greater than more tenured colleagues; however, justices slowly but surely surrender to relatively unfettered judicial power at the Supreme Court, as attitudes increasingly dominate decisionmaking. While votes adhering to precedent are more prevalent for newcomers, all justices are overwhelmingly influenced by their own ideologies, confirming the inability of the legal model to influence or explain this aspect of judicial behavior. Our results also indicate that the proclivity of prior research to specify an express period of acclimation may be flawed. Instead, acclimation is a dynamic process, ever evolving over justices' entire duration of service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]