When John Roberts acceded to the position of Chief Justice of the United States, he stated that one of his top priorities was to reduce the number of dissenting opinions issued by members of the Court. 1 Roberts believes dissent is a symptom of dysfunction. 2 This belief is shared with many justices past and present, the most famous of whom is his predecessor John Marshall, who squelched virtually all dissent during his 35 years as Chief Justice. 3 One of their arguments is that dissent weakens the Court by exposing internal divisions. 4 The Court would be better, perhaps more efficient at deciding cases and making law, if it spoke with one voice. This is a common refrain in American constitutional history. Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote that "[i]t is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right," stating that he would join opinions he disagreed with just for the sake of settling the law. 5 Other justices have called dissents "subversive literature" 6 and "useless" 7 , and, we presume, acted just like Brandeis. Another reason for the hostility to dissent is that dissent enables the majority to be bolder in its decision, because it is not forced to compromise. In a recent speech at Georgetown Law School, Chief Justice Roberts explained that "[t]he broader the agreement among the justices, the more likely it is a decision on the narrowest possible grounds." 8 Of course, this does not tell us the why this is good. We can guess it has something to do with Bickel's "passive virtues" and Sunstein's one-case-at-a-time minimalism. But whatever the reason, Roberts, like Marshall before him, believes that limiting dissent will help him achieve his unstated goals. To other past and present justices, most famously Chief Justice Harlan Stone and Justice William Brennan, dissent is a healthy, and even necessary, practice that