What Can We Infer When Justice Freeman Asks The First Question In A Criminal Case?

Yesterday, we showed that unlike many of his colleagues, Justice Freeman does not tend to ask the party he's voting against more questions at oral argument – he averages more questions to the appellants in every scenario. Today, we ask whether we can infer that Justice Freeman is writing an opinion in cases where he asks the first question.

We report the data in Table 475 on cases in which Justice Freeman was in the majority. In these cases, the answer to our question is no – writing an opinion does not make it noticeably more likely that Justice Freeman will ask the first question. Overall in affirmances, Justice Freeman asks the first question of appellants in 26.27% of cases, and leads off with appellees 13.87% of the time. When he's writing the majority, those numbers are virtually unchanged – 27.78% on appellants, 16.67% for appellees. When Justice Freeman is in the majority of an affirmance, but not writing an opinion, there's a 26.72% chance he'll ask the