Word: opinionizing
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When the U.S. Supreme Court scolded the Bush Administration last year for attempting to try suspected enemy combatants on the cheap, the ruling rested largely on one of the court's most honored precedents. It's the same opinion that helped force Richard Nixon to cough up those embarrassing tapes in 1974. And for more than 50 years it has guided the court in deciding whether a President has acted within his powers or whether he has stepped over the line...
...interesting thing is, it's not a majority opinion. It's a concurrence, a separate statement that a lone Justice, Robert Jackson, cooked up to accompany the court decision striking down Harry Truman's plan for taking over the steel mills in 1952. But its elegant reasoning long ago made it the go-to opinion when the court puts a President in his place...
...possible, to decide cases 9 to 0, with no pesky dissents or concurrences. As he advised a crowd two weeks ago at Northwestern University School of Law, "The court functions most effectively as a judicial institution saying what the law is when it can deliver one clear and focused opinion of the court...
...journalists. They haven't fared well recently with the courts, but for decades reporters shielded their sources by citing a famous concurrence from Justice Lewis Powell. In 1972, Powell joined the court's majority in denying journalists an exemption from testifying before a grand jury. But in a separate opinion, he offered an alternative--a test balancing press freedom against the obligation to testify--that many courts used to keep reporters off the witness stand. The opinion no doubt encouraged sources to speak and so allowed us all to become better informed...
Global warming skeptics may be scarce, but they're still being heard. Many have taken refuge in the land of Blog, where they obsessively parse the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sir Nicholas Stern and Al Gore. Although the pendulum of public opinion has swung swiftly and mercilessly away from them, the doubters provide a vital service. They keep the scientists and politicians in check, and are first to smack down the loons who want to shut down fossil-fuel industries. In Australia, the dynamic in grass-roots politics and public policy is toward immediate action...