We recover the lost history of concurring and dissenting without opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court. Although this practice has primarily been attributed to Justice Douglas, particularly his later decisions in tax cases, we trace its roots to the Court’s early years and demonstrate its consistent and sometimes frequent use through about the middle of the twentieth century. This article makes several contributions to the existing literature on opinion delivery practices. First, we discuss trends in the use of silent concurrences and dissents across time and justices using original data obtained from a manual review of every Supreme Court decision from its creation through OT 2014. Second, we offer a historical narrative that emphasizes the importance of institutional changes for understanding the rise and fall of this norm over time. Third, we emphasize the regular use of noting disagreement as an intermediate practice between silently acquiescing to majority positions, which characterized disagreement during the Court’s earlier years, to the proliferation of written concurrences and dissents in the modern era. Our empirical approach contributes to a growing body of quantitative historical research using comprehensive data collection efforts to gain analytical leverage over important questions concerning American legal history.

中文翻译：

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无意见的同意和反对

我们恢复了失去的对美国最高法院没有意见的同意和反对的历史。尽管这种做法主要归功于道格拉斯大法官，特别是他后来在税务案件中的裁决，但我们可以追溯到法院的早年，并证明它在整个二十世纪中叶始终如一，有时甚至经常使用。本文对现有关于意见传递实践的文献做出了一些贡献。首先，我们使用从最高法院创建到 2014 年 OT 的每项裁决的人工审查中获得的原始数据，讨论了跨时间和法官使用无声同意和异议的趋势。 其次，我们提供了一个历史叙述，强调制度的重要性随着时间的推移，理解这一规范的兴衰的变化。第三，我们强调经常使用注意到分歧作为一种中间做法，介于默许多数立场（法院早年间以分歧为特征）与现代书面同意和异议的激增之间。我们的实证方法有助于越来越多的定量历史研究，使用全面的数据收集工作来获得对有关美国法律史的重要问题的分析影响力。