Second Amendment Blog
Heller Watch
Posted by: Sebastian on 
Jun 23rd, 2008 | 
Filed under: 2nd Amendment
Smart people have said today is going to be the day. I’m going to be a contrarian and suggest that they will put it off until later in the week. Stay tuned for updates as The Court starts releasing opinions.
UPDATE: Not today folks. Chief Justice Roberts, you are such a tease. From SCOTUSBlog: “The only opinion remaining from the March sitting is Heller. The only Justice without a majority opinion from that sitting is Justice Scalia.”
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:20 am
I still think Thomas’ opinion is the one to watch for.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Ideally I’d like Heller to be a Thomas opinion, but I’ll take Scalia if that’s going to be the case.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 am
“The only Justice without a majority opinion from that sitting is Justice Scalia.”
What does that mean exactly? I took it to mean that Scalia’s opinion was not in agreement with the majority opinion, but I’m not used to SCOTUSblog-speak so I guess I don’t understand.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 am
I don’t think it will be a Scalia opinion - unless its overwhelming (8-1, 9-0). Otherwise, he’s just too controversial and at odds on too many undercurrents to be able to hold together a majority.
Now, it could be a Scalia opinion where a large number of other justices concur with the underlying opinion but lay out there own case and explain how they disagree with Scalia - thats actually very possible. . . but part of me thinks they will do this clean - get a very narrow opinion out that has an overwhelming number signing on to - make it a Roberts or a Kennedy opinion, or perhaps even float it out to Ginsberg to entice the left to stay on.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:15 am
Every decision has at least one justice write a majority decision. Usually there are at least four Justices who agree with the majority but do not write a majority opinion, but in some cases there can be up to eight. These individuals are said to ’sign on’ to the majority opinion.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:46 am
OK, gotcha. So it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t _have_ any opinions in concurrence with the majority; it just means that he hasn’t, so far, _written_ one of the majority opinions.
Makes sense now, thx.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Well, we could do worse than Justice Faintheart on the majority opinio, but we could surely do better.
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