497364007_b28f03366a_zYesterday, we addressed the length of majority opinions at the Illinois Supreme Court between 2000 and 2014. Today, we turn to concurrences and dissents.

Because they are structured differently, we expect special concurrences and dissents to follow the lead of the majority opinion in the same case: longer where the case is more complex, shorter for the simpler cases. The data suggests that dissents may be getting slightly longer, while special concurrences remain uniformly brief:

Table 20 C

Next week, we’ll turn to another topic in analyzing the Court’s decision-making: the role of amicus curiae briefs.

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