Law Commons^™

A Court Of Two Minds, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

What do the Justices think they’re doing? They seem to act like appeals judges, who address questions of law as needed to reach a decision — and yet also like curators, who single out only certain questions as worthy of the Supreme Court’s attention. Most of the time, the Court’s “appellate mind” and its “curator mind” are aligned because the Justices choose to hear cases where a curated question of interest is also central to the outcome. But not always. In some cases, the Court discovers that it cannot reach — or no longer wishes to reach — the originally …