While Supreme Court Justices are by no means bound by their past decisions, the Court often respects its past decisions for a variety of reasons. The reasons given for adhering the Court’s past precedents are often across between cases. Justice Kagan offered her interpretation for remaining faithful to precedent in dissent in last term’s Knick…
Tag: Lawrence v. Texas
The Recent Role of Separate Opinions
In a 2015 article for the Washington Post reviewing Melvin Urofsky’s book Dissent and the Supreme Court, the David Cole wrote, “What determines a great dissent…is not necessarily the power of the argument but the shifting tides of history…History, not rhetoric or cogency, determines whether a dissent wins out in the long run. Yet by articulating a…
When I Bake My Masterpiece: Understanding the Justices’ Positions in Masterpiece Cakeshop Based on Oral Arguments
Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission appears to be the Supreme Court case garnering the most public attention this term. The question in the case is whether a baker’s First Amendment rights (free speech and/or free expression) are violated when a law compels him to bake a cake for a couple in violation of his sincerely held…
Is a Recipe for Justice Kennedy a Recipe for Success?
The puns are endless with a case that goes by the name Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The stakes though are no laughing manner. If the Court decides all of the issues brought up in the case, boundaries of the First Amendment doctrine may be rewritten as could the defining lines between religious…
Empirical SCOTUS 