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More Evidence of the New Chief’s Citation Patterns

The set of four unanimous opinions handed down today by the Supreme Court includes two new opinions by Chief Justice Roberts, which gives us another chance to take a look at whether the Chief has an aversion to citing legal scholarship in his opinions (something that was widely debated in the legal blogosphere a while back). My quick skim of the opinions suggests that Sereboff v. Mid Atlantic Medical Services, an ERISA case, includes cites to three or four treatises, while DaimlerChrysler Corp v. Cuno, a standing case, does not cite any treatises or scholarly articles (not even this one).

UPDATE: Marty Lederman has a terrific comment on this thread that you really need to read in its entirety.  Here’s a taste:

I, for one, have been extremely impressed by Roberts’s opinions in the Solomon Amendment case, Ayotte, the RFRA hoasca tea case, and today’s Article III standing case (especially his revisionist reading of the Establishment Clause cases). But it is striking that, in all three cases, his opinions assume that the right answers can be gleaned largely from a careful and intelligent parsing of prior precedents. Indeed, what’s most striking, and most impressive, about the FAIR opinion, Ayotte, and today’s Cuno opinion is that Roberts is able to bring some much needed coherence to very scattered, contradictory and contested areas of constitutional law. He is making very deliberate choices that certain constitutional theories lurking in prior cases should prevail, and that others should be discarded, trying to bring coherence and logic to very difficult bodies of doctrine — and doing so while holding a unanimous Court, at that! This is very impressive, and definitely has its distinct virtues, even if one disagrees with some of the choices that he makes.