I n an interview published in the January/February 2007 issue of The Atlantic Magazine, Chief Justice Roberts explained that he is determined to help the Supreme Court produce more unanimous opinions than the justices managed during the Rehnquist era.

According to Roberts, the biggest problem with decisions that are loaded with multiple dissents (and concurrences that sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t) is not that they are difficult to read and understand – although they are.  No, the biggest problem, he says, is that “it’s bad, long-term, if people identify the rule of law with how individual justices vote.” Therefore it would be good, the Chief Justice told The Atlantic, “to have a commitment on the part of the Court to acting as a Court, rather than being more concerned about the consistency and coherency of an individual judicial record.”

After a promising start, however, the 2005 Term ended in June 2006 with what Justice Stevens called in one case a “cacophony” of contradictory opinions. Still, Roberts told The Atlantic, the media is making a mistake – and perhaps even performing a disservice – when it emphasizes such splintered decisions. Under his guidance, Roberts noted, the Court has had “more unanimous opinions announced in a row than ever before … in the modern era, but in the first 5–4 decision, people are writing, ‘So much for unanimity.’”

So my colleagues and I wondered: how did the Court do this time in response to Roberts’s push for greater unanimity? The answer seems to be, not bad at all -- if we take Supreme Court reporter Jan Crawford Greenburg’s advice and only look for greater unanimity in cases in which the Justices truly have a reasonable chance of finding common (albeit narrower) grounds for decision without compromising their bedrock principles. Writing for ABCnews.com, Greenburg pointed to the Court’s 9-0 decision in Sole v. Wyner, an attorney’s fees case in which Roberts assigned the opinion to Justice Ginsburg. That case, Greenburg says, is the “perfect example” of the Justices achieving unanimity by agreeing on a narrow ruling rather than fighting for a broader ruling that might have only garnered a bare 5-4 majority. The Court has been able to muster unanimous or near-unanimous decisions in a number of business-related cases this Term as well with results that often can be categorized as "pro-business."

But it must be said that when it comes to the big, “page one” cases involving such hot-button topics as abortion or affirmative action or the death penalty, the Roberts Court is as divided as the Court has ever been. In fact some observers think it’s even more divided now than in the past. Others disagree.

There is perhaps only one thing every observer can agree on. When it comes to closely divided cases, Justice Kennedy holds the key. In seven of the Court’s 5-4 opinions issued to date, Kennedy joined Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito to form a conservative majority that left all four liberals (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) in dissent. In Bowles v. Russell, Kennedy’s vote enabled the Court to hold a criminal defendant’s appeal time-barred even though he had faithfully followed the trial court’s order that gave him until a specific (but, it turns out, erroneous) date to appeal from his conviction.

Similar in tone, the Court's opinion in Lawrence v. Florida, held that the one-year statute of limitations for filing a federal habeas corpus petition is not suspended while a prisoner's petition for certiorari is pending in the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, in Uttecht v. Brown, the Court held that in a death penalty case the appellate courts must defer to the trial judge’s discretion in removing potential jurors who express doubts about the death penalty. In another death penalty case, Schriro v. Landrigan, the Court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to grant the convicted defendant an evidentiary hearing on his ineffective assistance of counsel of claim, while in Ayers v. Belmontes, the Court upheld the constitutionality of a “catch-all” capital jury instruction on mitigating evidence.

Then in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. the Court said that employees making a Title VII pay discrimination claim (that is, a claim that they received disparate treatment based on their race or gender) must do so within 180 days of the original discriminatory action -- not within 180 days of their last paycheck.

And of course famously in Gonzales v. Carhart, the Court with Kennedy’s help narrowly rejected a claim that Congress’s failure to include a health exception rendered the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional on its face.

Yet in five other 5-4 decisions this term Kennedy joined the four liberals and put the conservative four in dissent. Those cases include three death penalty cases out of Texas (Smith v. Texas, Brewer v. Quarterman, and Abdul-Kabir v. Quarterman), Philip Morris USA v. Williams (involving constitutional limitations on punitive damages), Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (involving the Clean Air Act), and Marrama v. Citizens Bank of Mass. (involving the Bankruptcy Code).

So get ready for next week, when the Court is expected to release opinions in the term’s two student diversity cases (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education) as well as a controversial student speech case, Morse v. Frederick. If the Chief Justice can persuade the Court to end the 2006 term with unanimous or near-unanimous opinions in any of those three cases, even the most cynical skeptic should be impressed.