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Self-reflective political scientists have extensively reviewed the history of the discipline and argued over its future, but to date there has been little effort to systematically survey undergraduate scope and methods courses (for an exception see Thies and Hogan 2005). This lack of data leaves the discipline unable to assess how much we are teaching undergraduates about the scope of political science or, indeed, what we mean by the scope of the discipline. Similarly, though there have been many battles waged over the appropriateness of various methodologies, it is not clear how much of this discussion, or how many of these methods, make it into the undergraduate classroom. Survey results from a nation-wide sample of political science departments indicate that most departments require a scope and methods course of their majors and that, while there is a great deal of variety in topics covered, some common themes exist and some common assignments are used.

Introduction While political scientists and legal academics have both evinced a “fascination with disagreement on courts,”1 this scholarly concentration on conflict rather than consensus has tended to focus on dissent and dissenting opinions. As far as we can tell, there is no authoritative history of concurring opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court. This article is a first effort to correct that oversight by examining developments and change in concurring behavior from the founding through the White Court (1921). This period covers the emergence of an institutionally independent national judicial branch and ends before the start of the modern, policy‐making Court era, which we argue begins with the Taft Court and the creation of a fully discretionary docket.

Justices' goals when writing concurrences continue to elude scholars. This project extends Baum's contention that justices' goals are bifurcated. The authors argue that justices use concurrences as means to both speak about their legal policy preferences and win by being members of the majority voting coalition. An analysis of the Burger and Rehnquist Courts' concurring behavior illustrates that members of the Court are both authoring and joining concurrences in ways previously undocumented. Specifically, justices have become comfortable not only authoring concurrences but regularly joining others' separate opinions as well-a trend the authors call choral-Court decision making.

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