{"id":1243,"date":"2003-06-24T11:24:24","date_gmt":"2003-06-24T15:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/06\/24\/1243.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:24","slug":"supreme-court-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/06\/24\/supreme-court-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger has been chiming in to an interesting discussion on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/logos\/journal\/\">Lorem Ipsum<\/a> about the Supreme Court CIPA case, and took a look at yesterday's slip opinions. There were 5 cases, and 24 opinions filed, including decisions, concurring opinions, dissenting opinions, and those that concurred in part and dissented in part.\n<p>\n<ul><li>7 opinions filed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supremecourtus.gov\/opinions\/02pdf\/02-516.pdf\">Gratz v. Bollinger<\/a> (the undergraduate case).\n<\/li><li>6 opinions filed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supremecourtus.gov\/opinions\/02pdf\/02-241.pdf\">Grutter v. Bollinger<\/a> (the Law School case).\n<\/li><li>5 opinions filed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supremecourtus.gov\/opinions\/02pdf\/02-361.pdf\">United States v. American Library Assn., Inc.<\/a>\n<\/li><li>Only 2 opinions in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supremecourtus.gov\/opinions\/02pdf\/02-722.pdf\">American Ins. Assn. v. Garamendi<\/a> (California's Holocaust Victim Insurance Relief Act), 5-4 (with an odd line-up of Souter O'Connor Kennedy Breyer and Chiefie, with Ginsberg, Stevens, Scalia and Thomas dissenting)\n<\/li><li>4 opinions in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.supremecourtus.gov\/opinions\/02pdf\/02-634.pdf\">Green Tree Financial Corp. v. Bazzle<\/a> (contracts and class arbitration)\n\n<p>I know very very little about the Supreme Court and its history; I don't know whether those numbers are really higher than usual. As I understand it, part of the job of the Supreme Court is to find in the specific case in front of them, and part is to establish precedent. I would think that having 5, or 6, or 7 opinions filed in a case makes it hard for a lower court next year to follow the precedent in a similar but not identical case.\n\n<p>I blame Chiefie, whose job it is to control the court. However, the scarier part is that the multiplication of opinions does make it seem that the nine justices do not enter into each case with open minds (guided by fixed principles), prepared for the give and take of intellectual discussion. There does not appear to be a meeting of minds on the court. It's not just that there are liberals, conservatives and moderates, it's that even the liberals do not seem to be willing to agree together. My concern is for the idea of the court, where the nine sit together (or their clerks do) and consider, and respect each other's ideas, and have, as a goal, agreement. If agreement is not possible with the nine, which it usually is not, then at least five should be able to agree on the decision, and four on the dissent. That they cannot seems to Your Humble Blogger to imply that they place a higher value on their own decisions over the court's function. I could very well be wrong, but that's how it looks to me.\n\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your Humble Blogger has been chiming in to an interesting discussion on Lorem Ipsum about the Supreme Court CIPA case, and took a look at yesterday&#8217;s slip opinions. There were 5 cases, and 24 opinions filed, including decisions, concurring opinions,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16793,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1243\/revisions\/16793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}