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Courts

2012

Supreme Court

Selected Works

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

A Modest Memoir: Justice Stevens’S Supreme Court Life, Laura K. Ray May 2012

A Modest Memoir: Justice Stevens’S Supreme Court Life, Laura K. Ray

Laura K. Ray

No abstract provided.

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Hiding Behind The Cloak Of Invisibility: The Supreme Court And Per Curiam Opinions, Ira P. Robbins May 2012

Hiding Behind The Cloak Of Invisibility: The Supreme Court And Per Curiam Opinions, Ira P. Robbins

Ira P. Robbins

Per curiam--literally translated from Latin to "by the court"-is defined by Black's Law Dictionary as "[a]n opinion handed down by an appellate court without identifying the individual judge who wrote the opinion." Accordingly the author of a per curiam opinion is meant to be institutional rather than individual, attributable to the court as an entity rather than to a single judge The United States Supreme Court issues a significant number of per curiam dispositions each Term. In the first six years of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, almost nine percent of the Court full opinions were per curiams. The prevalence …

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Circumstance And Strategy: Jointly Authored Supreme Court Opinions, Laura Ray Dec 2011

Circumstance And Strategy: Jointly Authored Supreme Court Opinions, Laura Ray

Laura K. Ray

The standard form of authorship for a Supreme Court opinion is a single author who then may be joined by any colleagues who are in agreement. There is, however, a significant and overlooked variant of this form, one used in a small cluster of major cases, most of them landmark decisions, over the past seventy years: the jointly authored opinion. In these cases, there may be as many as nine authors signing an opinion (as in Cooper v. Aaron) or as few as two (as in McConnell v. FEC). All the signatories may be credited with the entire opinion (as …

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