Recent Supreme Court terms have been marked by justices openly criticizing one another for rewriting statutes, ignoring precedent, and inserting policy preferences into law.

A new study by political scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led by Donald Snyder and Caitlyn Pierce, examines what lies beneath these public clashes. Analyzing more than six decades of decisions—from 1946 to 2011—the researchers applied a legal‑domain AI model trained on nearly 9,000 split decisions to quantify a concept they call “appeasement”: how much a justice acknowledges the majority while still dissenting.

The study finds that justices, especially those closer to the ideological center, frequently use conciliatory language, and that appeasement rises when majority coalitions grow larger and more diverse. These patterns suggest that strategic concessions may signal a justice’s openness to peer influence and help identify potential consensus builders in a highly polarized court. While the data do not cover today’s docket, the authors anticipate that appeasement may have declined as the Court has become more ideologically divided. Beyond the bench, the appeasement metric could illuminate how politicians in Congress and the executive branch balance agreement and disagreement in persuasive speech.