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...number of one-vote majority opinions was significantly lower this time around (approximately 17% of the cases compared to 33% last term). "What is striking is how many cases were not decided by 5-4 votes," says Richard Pildes, professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law. "With its new blood the court is still developing new patterns of communication and cooperation." (Until Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito came along, the court had the longest-serving body of the same nine people in Supreme Court history.) Nevertheless, even with fewer nail-biting decisions...
...banning the death penalty as punishment for the rape of a child (Kennedy v. Louisiana). These two particular cases resulted in closely contested 5-4 decisions, with justices falling lockstep into the predictable conservative and liberal factions and Justice Anthony Kennedy playing his expected role as the swing vote. But ideological blocs such as these have been a much rarer occurrence this season, belying the headlines that greeted both decisions. The gun decision was an anomaly in the way the court was behaving, says Richard Lazarus, director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University's Law School: "In this...
...bench with the hopes of uniting a fractured court and issuing opinions with one, unanimous voice. Instead, Roberts got a pileup of concurrences and dissents that often resulted in Kennedy determining the law. In the 24 decisions that came down 5-to-4 last year, Kennedy was the decisive vote in every case, never once dissenting. Of those 24, 19 of them reflected the traditional conservative-liberal split (Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Alito versus John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer) with the conservatives winning 13 and the liberals getting six. Says Lazarus, "The only...
...year-old girl can grow up knowing the same freedom that I knew when I was 6 years old, growing up in America," he once declared. As a matter of historical fact, that statement was downright bizarre. When Reagan was 6, in 1917, women and most blacks couldn't vote, and America's entry into World War I was whipping up an anti-German frenzy so vicious that some towns in Reagan's native Midwest banned the playing of Beethoven and Brahms. But for Reagan, who sometimes confused movies with real life, history usually meant myth. In his mind, American...
...ability to have a child - it's the courage to raise one." Last week, after the House passed a compromise bill on domestic spying that enraged liberals and civil libertarians, Obama announced that though he was against other eavesdropping compromises in the past, this time he was going to vote...