Judicial attitudes decide votes only when the law itself is genuinely ambiguous.

Evidence

These findings might seem to suggest that the law is nothing but an elaborate charade, designed to fool a credulous public while freeing judges to pursue their own policy goals. But the connection between judges’ attitudes and their votes is in fact subtler than that. When the appropriate legal outcome in a case is clear, decisions are unanimous, regardless of the judges’ attitudes. Thus in its 2016 Term, the U.S. Supreme Court decided more than half its cases unanimously. But when the appropriate legal outcome is not clear, when appellate judges are confronted with persuasive legal arguments on both sides of an issue, they must determine which arguments are stronger. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2582

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: It reframes the entire attitudinal-versus-legal model debate as conditional: law structures the easy cases, attitudes govern the hard ones — a reconciliation that resists a one-line summary.
• XREF: Connects to the legal-formalism versus legal-realism traditions of American legal thought and to Segal and Spaeth’s attitudinal model.