It's worth mentioning that while some parts of law can be really arcane (parents, terms of service, etc.), Supreme Court decisions are generally pretty readable.
Agreed! And the typography is perfect. I've enjoyed bypassing all the angles and bias of coverage and just reading the majority decision PDFs in full. As a layperson the implications of phrases do escape me, though. SCOTUS can get awfully terse.
Late in law school, I ended up writing a study guide for a multi-day Constitutional Law seminar for non-lawyers, and found that unpacking all of the legal turns of phrase and items that would carry huge implications when read by lawyers took between 3x and 15x the space of whatever segment I was unpacking, with an average around 7.5x-8x. And according to feedback that still ended up being a bit dense for most readers. Worst volunteer gig I've ever agreed to!
The dissenting opinions are also quite enlightening because they point out weaknesses in the majority and concurring opinions that might not be apparent to those of us outside the field.
Justices deliberately write their dissents in the hope that people will read them, be persuaded, and then those will eventually become established law. Ginsburg and Scalia were masters of this.
By the time you see a published SCOTUS decision clerks have definitely checked all citations. The problem is that occasionally the source or interpretation is questionable/contentious.
There's something very funny and simultaneously chilling about a majority opinion authored by Gorsuch[1] who has said “[o]nly the written word is the law” [1] totally mixing up laughing gas and a toxic pollutant emitted by cars.
[1] I know the clerks actually write them, HN pedants.
Clerks have much more limited time than one might think, and research is basically an added-on function that they never staffed for once courts started engaging in it.
“Facts” from amicus briefs make it in all the time without an apparent attempt at verification.
Perhaps they do check and then ignore their findings, but why bother with that?
You may be referring to the court's (and other appellate courts') long-standing practice of not second guessing a trial court's finding of what did or didn't happen, unless a "clear error" is demonstrated to have been committed by the trial court.
SCOTUS decisions and opinions, therefore, should not be construed as to concur with the trial court about what actually happened. They take it as granted that those things occurred, and provide the best legal resolution they can under those assumptions. The cases they hear aren't about determining "who did what". That's done and settled usually. They are about "what now?"
Gorsuch mixing up nitrous oxide and nitrogen oxide over and over is a recent fun example. The court also has engaged in fact finding despite the rules. Kennedy v Bremerton is one example. Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP is another.
You also see absolute garbage lies. FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate has the majority saying "we can't find examples of X happening" while the dissent has a big list of examples of X happening. Or just straight up falsehoods about original understanding. DC v. Heller is a great example of this.
I mean that they make errors in statement of fact supporting their rulings and, worse, incorporate those facts into their ruling in material ways.
Say the Supreme Court majority writes, as guidance to lower courts, that interpretation of a certain amendment should feature consideration of laws enacted early in the country’s history, and before its founding. They further write that for the specific question before them, the total absence of similar laws in that history means they must rule a certain law unconstitutional.
Further suppose they were simply factually incorrect to the point that such laws were in fact common and are very easy to find, if you look like at all.
Now what? If you apply their guidance on how to analyze these questions, you’d have to reverse their ruling on laws similar to the one they struck down, should they come before you. But they ruled that specific one unconstitutional… but their ruling was contrary to the guidance they gave.
So we end up tied in a bit of a knot. Had these facts been argued rather than pulled out of some damn amicus brief without examination, perhaps the government would have presented a large pile of examples to rebut the simply-false claim that no similar laws existed in the country’s early history. But the court injected these “facts” as a key part of their reasoning when writing their decision, instead. Would it have changed the outcome? No. Would it, perhaps, have made it too embarrassing even for these clowns, to include that particular bit in their ruling? Maybe! And future lower court cases might take a different course, as a result.
[EDIT] The take-away for the casual reader of Supreme Court opinions, then, is that if they write something like "no examples of such laws exist until [YEAR]" don't be surprised if that turns out to be hilariously wrong. A "fact" making it into a Supreme Court opinion is not a strong indication the fact is... an actual fact. Their opinions are far less well-researched than one might suppose, emphasis on far, it's not that they're just imperfect like any people, their fact checking is outright poor by any standards.
My specific example is just Bruen with the serial numbers filed off.
Factual errors are downright common (a Google will turn up many efforts at fact-checking the "facts" in Supreme Court opinions) and aren't a new problem, dating back basically forever.
One key problem is that they simply don't have the resources to check all their facts. Their sources of facts are often amicus briefs from interest groups and specialized court-lobbyists, drawn from large piles and quickly skimmed for relevance by overworked early-20s law clerks. It would be surprising if they didn't get things wrong all the time. They do—luckily, a lot of times, it barely matters, but sometimes they get facts wrong that were central to their opinion.
The point is, don't believe a "fact" you read in a court opinion without double-checking. Even if it's about legal history.
[EDIT] As my sibling commenter points out, it's also the case that sometimes they just lie on purpose. But even absent that, the circumstances under which opinions are written would generate factual errors by accident, with some frequency.
FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a great example of a case where the majority says "we don't see examples of X" while the dissent cites a big list of X.
Heller is also a famous case where basically every historian (as well as the defense) points out clearly that Scalia's interpretation just isn't the original understanding of the text.
I was making a barely-veiled reference to Bruen, actually. "Can cities require demonstration of need, to carry firearms?"
The bump stock ruling's stupidity had more to do with resting entirely on silly, plainly-motivated reasoning than its relying on objectively wrong "facts".
Incidentally, I was wrong about it mattering whether it was argued: the historical evidence was argued, and the majority simply went "uhhhh those many examples don't count, because I don't want them to". What's been turned up since the case is examples that fit the much narrower criteria they said would have been needed (neatly carved out to evade the provided examples) but positively asserted don't exist (to any notable degree), in such volume that it's beyond clear that restricting carry of firearms in towns on a need-basis was common throughout the country's history, and not just in the West (their reasoning for rejecting those examples, I shit you not, was "um, those don't count because they're from one area, never mind it's a giant area"—if it's starting to look like they were playing Calvinball with that ruling, it's because that's exactly what they were doing)
Mostly agree about Constitutional cases. Some of the less sexy statutory construction cases are written for a smaller audience, and even as a lawyer, if you don’t practice in that field, they can be pretty opaque.
I only read the big cases since law school, so take this with a grain of salt -- I've only read one or two KBJ decisions and a handful from Kavanaugh and ACB.
In terms of legal clarity alone, Gorsuch and then Kagan are ahead of the pack by some margin, followed at some distance by Roberts and ACB. Sotomayor is great as a writer, but not in terms of legal clarity. I think Thomas is middle-of-the-pack, and I think he gets underrated in this regard because people dislike his opinions. Again, experience of Kavanaugh and KBJ's writing is limited, but they're at least not far behind the pack here.
Alito stands alone as the only one I'd say is bad for a Supreme Court justice. And that's relative, so it doesn't mean he's awful, but I do actively avoid his writing.
The variance gets way higher the further from SCOTUS you go. At the state level it's basically roulette.
I'd agree with this. Kagan is the best overall, Roberts is up there when he wants to be and isn't forcing it, and yes Thomas writes fairly well but what he writes is abysmal.
Alito is hands down the worst writer and one of the worst to ever sit on the court. He's not the brightest but thinks he's a savant and writes with a smugness and conceit that drips off the page on top of being as disingenuous as they come. Reading anything he writes is torture.
Yeah, when he's like this his writing goes off a cliff. I feel like it peaks any time Sotomayor wrote whatever he's disagreeing with, but that may just be me.
I suppose that they are free to focus on readability when they don't have to structure their writing in order to defend their decision-making from anyone, being the highest court of the land.
A few points to the contrary: The primary purpose for their writing of opinions is not to defend the decisions, but to instruct lower courts on how they should reason on similar cases. So it very much matters on a practical level that their reasoning is sound. Second, if the goal is a cogent, defensible argument, readability is in support of that objective, whereas you suggest that readability is somehow (?) at odds with cogency and defensibility. Thirdly, the justices are keenly aware that the interested public consumes their opinions too, and that they are, in fact, ethically and morally bound to defend their decisions to the public.
> you suggest that readability is somehow (?) at odds with cogency and defensibility
All I am saying is that writing can be clearer and more concise when you don't have to include asides and digressions to preemptively defend it from criticism.
This is a technical point on power dynamics and writing style. When the authors are in a position of power, then they can focus more on readability (and cogency) and less on playing defense, because their court seats are secure for life.
By contrast, justices in lower courts are influenced by organizational politics and must focus more on defensibility, which may come at the expense of clarity.
So I do not find it surprising that the supreme court is able to produce more readable decisions than lower courts, because they have unique incentives.
> The primary purpose for their writing of opinions is not to defend the decisions, but to instruct lower courts on how they should reason on similar cases.
Correct. This is different from lower courts, which also explains why they are able to focus on readability.
Being the only non-democratically elected branch of government in a democracy, the courts don't enjoy direct approval from the people. So while the structure of the institutions seem to give them power, their authority ultimately hinges on whether people perceive their decisions fair and just.
When courts make unpopular decisions and can't explain why, there's always a risk of some constitutional crisis. If courts keep making decisions that they can't rationally defend, at some point their authority will begin to erode. (And if you followed the USSC rulings in recent years you might start to understand why. Maybe the resentment not yet directly targeted towards the courts, but those decisions did add fuel to the already divisive politics in the US.)
This site is the personal blog of a well-regarded reporter that is a primary contributor to SCOTUSBlog: https://www.scotusblog.com/
All these posts are cross-posted there. If I recall correctly the reason for the cross-post setup has to do with conflict-of-interest avoidance since she is married to the owner of SCOTUSBlog. So you’re probably better off reading that site directly than this one.
For those interested, here are some other good resources:
* The Oyez Project has 2 podcasts (really just pure SCOTUS audio): oral arguments and opinion announcements. (SCOTUS justices verbally announce summaries of their written opinions from the bench on the day they are released.) In lieu of links, I advise just searching on your podcatcher of choice.
* The National Constitution Center’s “We The People” podcast is excellent. It’s constitutional-law debate on current topics, but very academic and generally non-partisan. Again, search on your podcatcher.
* Justia provides e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds of opinion releases (summaries and links to the PDF opinions) for both (1) federal appellate courts (SCOTUS and the courts of appeals) and (2) state courts of last resort. There are also weekly newsletters and RSS for opinions by subject area (maritime, bankruptcy, business, etc.). The summaries are … okay. Not terribly well written but they give you enough of an overview to determine whether to pull and read the opinion. Link: https://connect.justia.com/about-daily-summaries
* The federal court websites are generally pretty good and provide their own RSS feeds of opinion releases.
Hard to take a law podcast seriously when it openly broadcasts a political agenda. The image with Trump with a partisan caption, all the partisan logo T's in the merch shop ("abortion is healthcare", "leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks", etc.). The one linked here and SCOTUSBlog seem much better.
Having a viewpoint isn't a sin. The SCOTUS justices are allowed to rule on cases from a political viewpoint - even if it's euphemistically called a judicial philosophy - so why hold podcasters to a higher standard? At least they're upfront about it and you know what you're in for. That's what people say they like about the president elect.
Just sounds pro-democracy and pro-ethics, of that's an "agenda" then it's a good one. What you've described increases my desire to watch it, not decrease.
Openly calling people "freaks" is not exactly indicative that you can expect that person to be impartial and accurate in their reporting of the facts. Moreover, calling abortion "healthcare" is disingenuous at best. Everyone knows damn well why people oppose abortion, and trying to euphemistically refer to it as healthcare is willfully ignoring the dispute.
I like knowing someone's bias. It makes it easier to understand their viewpoint whether I agree with it or not. It's the people that claim to be unbiased that worry me the most. While not always true, I suspect them of lying or lacking self-awareness.
The two hosts are center-right, but I think their takes are largely pretty fair. Note: Sarah Isgur worked in the Trump Justice Department but is hardly a fan of Trump… again, I find her pretty fair minded).
There are some projects around the world to force lawyers to write in "normal" language. (Which BTW, is how it should be, as we should be able to fully understand the laws that can cost money or send us to jail).
Off topic: does somebody have some update on any such a project? Would be great news to see some important country taking action into it.
I think legalize is the way it is because it requires precision. A lot of the words and phrases that show up in legal documents don't have an easy definition because they're litigated terms. "fair use" isn't just "a justified use of some media", it's a specific pointer that points at a corpus of laws and decisions over decades and decades.
We generally want to be able to assume that the legal system makes similar decisions given similar situations, but the world doesn't hand it precise duplicates. Words that point at specific facts of a situation from the past are always going to be complex. It's not just for describing the situation narratively, it's also got to communicate specific categories of facts. How would we simply communicate that we (western legal tradition for example) care about the fact a murder was planned. What is planning? Is planning a murder a crime, and if not, why does it make the crime of murder worse? "Mens Rea" gives us a pointer to refer to the non-criminal act of having the intention to commit a crime. That's pretty useful, especially when you can CMD+F for that over centuries of people hashing out each case where the mental state of the accused mattered.
I do think there's a case for simplified explanations of legal text, but the source document should probably remain the "real" document.
You absolutely can get precision and plain language at the same time. See, for example, the English text of the GDPR.
The ideal situation is that we only need about half an hour of instruction (saying things much like your second paragraph) before a literate amateur can interpret most laws correctly. That instruction can then be given in schools: it could be lumped in along with all the other miscellanea ("here's how to vote", basic financial literacy, sex-ed, etc).
I'll freely admit to complete ignorance, but this seems like a bad idea.
Much like we use well-defined but somewhat arcane terminology to talk about computers, because precision is important, I'm skeptical about the implications of "plain" language in laws.
Precision and comprehensibility to an uneducated person seem like they would always be at odds.
The laws are basically jargon. There is a good reason behind the wording, it rests on centuries of case law of people hammering out exactly what each work or phrase means exactly, but it does add a layer of obfuscation for the layman. The law is a huge machine, and the laws are the code. Could it be better? Definitely. Lots of decisions were made that were a good idea at the time but are now pain points, but the system is too big to make systematic changes. You have to work within the framework.
> the system is too big to make systematic changes
This seems like a flawed argument to me that if applied would see technology stagnating. The reason it’s flawed is the assumption that the system is at a fixed max size. However, if it’s growing quickly, you can always come up with new systemic ways of doing things that are divorced from the past and over time most of the things are done the new way. You can even refactor/replace the old stuff over time. Law isn’t quite like code which is where this analogy breaks down a bit but something to think about.
I'm not going to fine or send somebody to jail with my computer jargon... that is a huge difference. I'm not agains jargon, in other disciplines, even internally between lawyers in procedures for example. But the law that applies to ME, I have to be able to parse it.
I would rather laws continue to be written with precision and for the government to have an information portal describing the relevant legal obligations in plain language. Forcing laws themselves to be written in plain language is a recipe for disaster. Imagine the tax code was subject to that constraint, for example. Corporations would have a field day finding loopholes.
Software can also have a huge impact on our lives and I don't think anyone would insist that software must be written so as to be easily understood by people who are not software developers.
As someone who works with legal language regularly, the notion that it's designed for clarity is hilarious. It's often constructed deliberately to obsfucate its purpose. Plain clear language with defined terms is legally binding and difficult to circumvent.
I can understand that, but I don't know if legal texts would be more explicit given simpler language. You can bake ambiguity into any text you want. "Simple english" will naturally just have less words than legalese, since that's the thing people find so daunting about it. Doesn't that mean that either A) words will have multiple overlapping meanings or B) entire phrases will have to be used to explain what is normally 1 word? Either case leaves a lot of room for "offensive lawyering".
Defined legal terms is just what we have now, but starting over.
I specifically said precision and not clarity, which is not the same. The thing is, though, that legal language is not "designed" for anything, in fact it is not "designed" at all.
As for being constructed deliberately to obfuscate its purpose, all I can say is that that's not my experience and it seems like a pretty self-defeating aim to me. For legal language to have any value at all, you have to be reasonably certain that a court would give effect to your intended meaning, and the more you obfuscate your intentions, the bigger the risk that it will be construed in an unintended way by a court.
> Plain clear language with defined terms is legally binding and difficult to circumvent.
As soon as you introduce defined terms, it is instantly less plain and less clear.
Ooh, this is something boring few people know about! There have been many efforts across the US government to simplify the language used in documents. Nixon, Clinton, and Obama all worked on this. Obama actually got a group organized around this, and there are now progress reports available on how the US is doing: https://www.doi.gov/plainlanguage
In a common law system, the benefit of the arcane language is that it's been tested in court before, so it has a definite meaning. In that sense, it's actually "clear", even if it's pretty obscure to the layman. By contrast, novel wording has not been tested in previous cases, so no matter how clearly it might be written, there's a degree of uncertainty. A term doesn't have a definite legal meaning until a judge has made a ruling on it. That's why contracts and wills, particularly, often use weird phrasing.
It's good to get an uneditorialized view so you can know what's going on without wasting your breath making the same complaints over and over.
But that doesn't mean the complaints are wrong. SCOTUS is an insane, dysfunctional institution.
The premise of judicial review is that if you have ideologically-aligned justices, then any petitioner who disagrees with Congress or the executive can file a lawsuit, hit the appeal button twice, and get SCOTUS to undo the law. The amount of law that is supposedly derived from the (tangentially related) terse sentences of the constitution is immense and, imo, completely unjustifiable.
The court's ability to strike down 100-year-old laws (whether acts of Congress or their own previous decisions), and their ability to effect these changes at times when the legislature is in a more or less favorable position to react, is destabilizing.
Even if this isn't convincing, just look at the farce that is lifetime appointments. Large swaths of our ways of living are dependent on the health, age, and egos of these people. We have had manifestly unfit justices cling on to the bench in hopes that they can retire under a friendly president. We can do better.
It's partisan. It's no coincidence that the side disagreeing with all the EFFECTS of the decisions (not necessarily even the legal interpretations - those tend not to get addressed) is the one calling it corrupt.
- There is a partisan component when democrats criticize the effect of cases like Dobbs, Janus, and Trump v. USA. This definitely exists.
- There is definitely a legal interpretation component. I heard some good analysis on legal interpretation on NPR around the Chevron deference when Loper v. Raimondo happened. They had on law professors, federal lawyers, and even one of the lawyers who argued the original Chevron case. There was a lot of content educating people on the history of Chevron deference, what it means, and what the new ruling might mean for regulators in the future. I've also seen a lot of discussion poking holes in the unitary executive theory (on the left) and justifying it (on the right). You sometimes have to dig to find this - long discussions on legal theory don't exactly make for compelling media.
- Finally, there is a "corruption on the SCOTUS" component. I would argue that the timing here is partisan, but the material is not. The conflicts of interest documented are factual, and the calls to adopt a code of ethics should have been a nonpartisan issue. Personally, I believe that the GOP learned the wrong lesson from the Nixon impeachment and Bork nomination and has adopted a more doveish stance on balancing political power versus corruption within their party, and the partisan lean of the SCOTUS scandals is a consequence of this.
I'll be upset with liberal justices, too, if evidence turns up that any of them are being bribed on a grand scale by billionaires.
That this is regarded as partisan by anyone is why we're screwed. The revelations about Thomas should have had all of Washington after his head. Nope, it's "partisan" so zero action taken and normal people are even confused enough about it that here we are, having this exchange. If that doesn't scare you, it should.
Plenty of evidence has turned up already? This is just a small smattering of the potential bribes the liberals justices took.
> Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disclosed taking more trips than any other justice in 2018, totaling 14. She visited Tel Aviv, Israel where she was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Genesis Prize Foundation. Shortly following the award ceremony, she disclosed being provided transportation, food and lodging as a tourist and guest of billionaire Israeli businessman Morris Kahn. Companies spawned by Kahn have had had business before the Supreme Court before. The high court handed Amdocs Limited a win in November 2017 when it declined to take up a patent-related case.
> Justice Stephen Breyer disclosed a dozen trips, three of which were supported by the wealthy Chicago-based Pritzker family. Breyer took two trips related to his position on the Pritzker Prize for Architecture jury, which honors architects each year. Breyer has served on the Pritzker jury since 2011 and became chair in 2018. He also disclosed taking a one-week trip to Ireland and Spain as part of the “Pritzker Fly-Around Program,” which paid for his transportation, lodging and meals. Breyer has taken 219 reimbursed trips since 2004, more than any other sitting justice.
The Republican members weren't disclosing anything, including on their required reporting, until they got caught, years after the fact. There's also tons of just super corrupt stuff, like Harlan Crow buying Clarence Thomas's mothers home for him for above market rate, and letting her continue to live there literally rent free.
Ask yourself this: why are you only hearing about this 13 years later? This wasn't a big deal when the allegedly problematic ruling on the hedge fund came down, only when the ruling on Roe v. Wade did.
I won't comment on the factual accuracy of the claims in the article. I haven't investigated them thoroughly, so I don't have an informed opinion on them. But if you want a rebuttal, maybe read the response from Alito linked to in the article? https://www.wsj.com/articles/propublica-misleads-its-readers...
Because "Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures." It was extremely difficult for anyone to find out about this.
Parts of Alito's response are extremely difficult to believe.
> Until a few months ago, the instructions for completing a Financial Disclosure Report told judges that “[p]ersonal hospitality need not be reported,”
Alito intentionally cuts out the rest of this sentence. The law says "except that any food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality of an individual need not be reported". Obviously a private jet flight does not qualify as any of these categories. Why did he ignore that part of the law?
> My recollection is that I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of brief and casual comments at events attended by large groups.
On a multi-day fishing trip with a very small group, where you were personally hosted by Paul Singer, you only made small talk? You flew on his private jet, and were photographed multiple times posing with him in front of a tiny boat or plane that only held a handful of people, so you must have spent many hours with him and only a couple other people. It is completely unbelievable that anybody in this situation with a sitting supreme court justice would only make small talk.
Why did he invite you, if he didn't care about your position as a justice and you barely knew each other?
> when I was invited shortly before the event
Who invited you?
> Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me.
Alito does not address the third option of not going. What was this event and why was it important he attend? He doesn't say.
This calls to mind complaints from a few years ago about fact-checking as "damaging to the reputation" of the person whose claims were fact-checked and identified as false.
One's reputation is damaged when they choose to tell a lie, not when someone else points it out.
Similarly, when someone accepts a bribe, they have damaged their integrity. That damage was not done by the person who exposes the bribe, but by the person who chose to accept the bribe.
Put another way: unethical behavior is unethical regardless of whether one gets caught while engaging in it.
Is your assertion that no reporters disliked Alito enough—and/or, that none were career-advancement-motivated enough—to bother reporting on this in 2008, and that's why it was only reported recently?
It seems to me the more likely explanation is that nobody who might be inclined to report on it, knew about it then.
Maybe. But even if that's true, then why did the people "inclined to report on it" only find out about it right after Dobbs?
You could say it was just coincidence, but this isn't the only story making accusations against conservative justices that came out right after the Dobbs decision. I'd say its far more likely the result of opposition research. Which doesn't necessarily mean its not true, just that you should take it with a few extra grains of salt.
No, of actual corrupt behavior. Plenty of us would get fired from our jobs for less. Much of what’s happened would get lower justices disciplined, because there are ethics rules with teeth for them.
Do you read Alito’s rebuttal you linked as an actual rebuttal of the events? It reads as a “yeah, sure, but it’s fine, trust me” to me.
>> Plenty of us would get fired from our jobs for less.
No we wouldn’t. The contention that “plenty of us” would be fired for going on a fishing trip is farcical on its face and even more laughable when you consider how much is given away in the private sector for “business development” or “marketing” reasons.
We get it. You don’t like the conservative justices. There’s no reason to start making ridiculous statements that make you look like an ideological chicken little. While you’re all over this thread hating on Alito and Thomas, I don’t see you saying much about Kagan and Breyer. Why is that?
> No we wouldn’t. The contention that “plenty of us” would be fired for going on a fishing trip is farcical on its face
If someone did business with our company and I was in any way connected with decisions regarding that, and it turned out they’d spent tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on gifts for me, yeah, I would, even if there was no straight line between the gifts and them later getting what they want, and even if I said I didn’t know, because I should have known. And there are industries with far more scrutiny and stricter rules than the one I’m in. Millions of employees are in the same boat.
These aren’t branded bic pens or a box of doughnuts. C’mon. What’s farcical is pretending this isn’t naked corruption that would get smacked down despite any protestations of “lol it’s fine, trust me” or “oh sorry I didn’t know” from the perpetrators in any other context.
> While you’re all over this thread hating on Alito and Thomas, I don’t see you saying much about Kagan and Breyer. Why is that?
Because the topic has been Alito, and because the known gifts the two you name have received in the last 20 years are under $20,000 combined while Alito’s alone is 10x their combined total(!) and Thomas has received gifts amounting to at least $4m(!!!) in the same time frame. There are two outliers and they both happen to be Republicans, who also have both failed to report really large gifts, not just “whoops I forgot about that $50 lunch”
Let’s absolutely audit the shit out of all of them, I’m entirely on board. Let’s get an investigation right up in these too-powerful-to-touch folks’ finances and see what we find for all of them. Definitely would love to see that. Several of the sub-six-figure gift totals seem too high, too. Drag them all before Congress, subpoena their bank records, by all means, and to all of them, sure.
But what we know now is that two are exceptionally-bad even by lax Supreme Court standards. Maybe more are, too, and I’d say what we know already is enough that they should all have their lives turned upside down to see how far this goes.
>> If someone did business with our company and I was in any way connected with decisions regarding that, and it turned out they’d spent tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on gifts for me, yeah, I would, even if there was no straight line between the gifts and them later getting what they want, and even if I said I didn’t know, because I should have known. And there are industries with far more scrutiny and stricter rules than the one I’m in. Millions of employees are in the same boat.
Nahhh.
>> Because the topic has been Alito
You elsewhere in this comment section: “I'll be upset with liberal justices, too, if evidence turns up that any of them are being bribed on a grand scale by billionaires.”
Y—yes, though? I’m dead certain I’d be out the door over that. It’s a pretty common set of policies and that wouldn’t be considered a grey area, or even in sight of a grey area. I’d need serious company-politics pull to have any hope. Have you worked for large companies? Small ones may not emphasize this as much (the ones I’ve been at didn’t)
> You elsewhere in this comment section: “I'll be upset with liberal justices, too, if evidence turns up that any of them are being bribed on a grand scale by billionaires.”
Yes. Got something you want to bring up? Not sure if the relevance of your quoting me there to any of the rest of this, but if you’re trying to broach that topic, absolutely, show me the reporting.
> Your partisanship is showing.
I’m beginning to think this isn’t exactly a good faith discussion, though.
Yeah SCOTUSBlog is great. NYT reporting on lower profile cases is often really great too. For higher profile cases I agree coverage is dominated by partisan concerns and discussing the outcomes rather than the law.
Out of curiosity, are all courts in the US required to publish transcripts or videos? It would be interesting to have bots processing those feeds to keep tabs on what is going on.
Federal courts transcribe everything and the transcripts are generally possible to obtain although in some cases the transcripts are not free. State courts vary.
Availability of videos or audio recordings varies even more by jurisdiction.
Practically all published judicial material is a public record (although only under the 1st Amend, generally not under FOIA laws).
The problem is that a great number of state courts (which is the majority of courts in the USA) use shitty outdated systems and don't have Internet access to their records. Or they heavily restrict access to only attorneys.
The records are public, though, so if there is some specific you want, you can get it. It just might take some effort.
It's worth mentioning that while some parts of law can be really arcane (parents, terms of service, etc.), Supreme Court decisions are generally pretty readable.
Agreed! And the typography is perfect. I've enjoyed bypassing all the angles and bias of coverage and just reading the majority decision PDFs in full. As a layperson the implications of phrases do escape me, though. SCOTUS can get awfully terse.
Late in law school, I ended up writing a study guide for a multi-day Constitutional Law seminar for non-lawyers, and found that unpacking all of the legal turns of phrase and items that would carry huge implications when read by lawyers took between 3x and 15x the space of whatever segment I was unpacking, with an average around 7.5x-8x. And according to feedback that still ended up being a bit dense for most readers. Worst volunteer gig I've ever agreed to!
> just reading the majority decision PDFs in full
The dissenting opinions are also quite enlightening because they point out weaknesses in the majority and concurring opinions that might not be apparent to those of us outside the field.
Justices deliberately write their dissents in the hope that people will read them, be persuaded, and then those will eventually become established law. Ginsburg and Scalia were masters of this.
It's actually fascinating the number of times that the dissent will later become the law after culture changes.
Just be sure to double-check any “facts” they cite before taking them as true. Because they, uh, kinda don’t. Check them, that is.
Double check everything: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/06/28/supreme...
The Justices have made some bone headed mistakes, especially this last crop.
By the time you see a published SCOTUS decision clerks have definitely checked all citations. The problem is that occasionally the source or interpretation is questionable/contentious.
Except when they haven't: https://newrepublic.com/article/183285/supreme-court-chevron...
There's something very funny and simultaneously chilling about a majority opinion authored by Gorsuch[1] who has said “[o]nly the written word is the law” [1] totally mixing up laughing gas and a toxic pollutant emitted by cars.
[1] I know the clerks actually write them, HN pedants.
[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/06/symposium-the-triumph-of-...
Clerks have much more limited time than one might think, and research is basically an added-on function that they never staffed for once courts started engaging in it.
“Facts” from amicus briefs make it in all the time without an apparent attempt at verification.
Perhaps they do check and then ignore their findings, but why bother with that?
You may be referring to the court's (and other appellate courts') long-standing practice of not second guessing a trial court's finding of what did or didn't happen, unless a "clear error" is demonstrated to have been committed by the trial court.
SCOTUS decisions and opinions, therefore, should not be construed as to concur with the trial court about what actually happened. They take it as granted that those things occurred, and provide the best legal resolution they can under those assumptions. The cases they hear aren't about determining "who did what". That's done and settled usually. They are about "what now?"
There's more to it than that.
Gorsuch mixing up nitrous oxide and nitrogen oxide over and over is a recent fun example. The court also has engaged in fact finding despite the rules. Kennedy v Bremerton is one example. Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP is another.
You also see absolute garbage lies. FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate has the majority saying "we can't find examples of X happening" while the dissent has a big list of examples of X happening. Or just straight up falsehoods about original understanding. DC v. Heller is a great example of this.
I mean that they make errors in statement of fact supporting their rulings and, worse, incorporate those facts into their ruling in material ways.
Say the Supreme Court majority writes, as guidance to lower courts, that interpretation of a certain amendment should feature consideration of laws enacted early in the country’s history, and before its founding. They further write that for the specific question before them, the total absence of similar laws in that history means they must rule a certain law unconstitutional.
Further suppose they were simply factually incorrect to the point that such laws were in fact common and are very easy to find, if you look like at all.
Now what? If you apply their guidance on how to analyze these questions, you’d have to reverse their ruling on laws similar to the one they struck down, should they come before you. But they ruled that specific one unconstitutional… but their ruling was contrary to the guidance they gave.
So we end up tied in a bit of a knot. Had these facts been argued rather than pulled out of some damn amicus brief without examination, perhaps the government would have presented a large pile of examples to rebut the simply-false claim that no similar laws existed in the country’s early history. But the court injected these “facts” as a key part of their reasoning when writing their decision, instead. Would it have changed the outcome? No. Would it, perhaps, have made it too embarrassing even for these clowns, to include that particular bit in their ruling? Maybe! And future lower court cases might take a different course, as a result.
[EDIT] The take-away for the casual reader of Supreme Court opinions, then, is that if they write something like "no examples of such laws exist until [YEAR]" don't be surprised if that turns out to be hilariously wrong. A "fact" making it into a Supreme Court opinion is not a strong indication the fact is... an actual fact. Their opinions are far less well-researched than one might suppose, emphasis on far, it's not that they're just imperfect like any people, their fact checking is outright poor by any standards.
I think you're using too many suppositions.
Do you have an actual example? Or two since you're using plurals?
My specific example is just Bruen with the serial numbers filed off.
Factual errors are downright common (a Google will turn up many efforts at fact-checking the "facts" in Supreme Court opinions) and aren't a new problem, dating back basically forever.
One key problem is that they simply don't have the resources to check all their facts. Their sources of facts are often amicus briefs from interest groups and specialized court-lobbyists, drawn from large piles and quickly skimmed for relevance by overworked early-20s law clerks. It would be surprising if they didn't get things wrong all the time. They do—luckily, a lot of times, it barely matters, but sometimes they get facts wrong that were central to their opinion.
The point is, don't believe a "fact" you read in a court opinion without double-checking. Even if it's about legal history.
[EDIT] As my sibling commenter points out, it's also the case that sometimes they just lie on purpose. But even absent that, the circumstances under which opinions are written would generate factual errors by accident, with some frequency.
FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a great example of a case where the majority says "we don't see examples of X" while the dissent cites a big list of X.
Heller is also a famous case where basically every historian (as well as the defense) points out clearly that Scalia's interpretation just isn't the original understanding of the text.
Won't someone think of the bump stock manufacturers?!
I was making a barely-veiled reference to Bruen, actually. "Can cities require demonstration of need, to carry firearms?"
The bump stock ruling's stupidity had more to do with resting entirely on silly, plainly-motivated reasoning than its relying on objectively wrong "facts".
Incidentally, I was wrong about it mattering whether it was argued: the historical evidence was argued, and the majority simply went "uhhhh those many examples don't count, because I don't want them to". What's been turned up since the case is examples that fit the much narrower criteria they said would have been needed (neatly carved out to evade the provided examples) but positively asserted don't exist (to any notable degree), in such volume that it's beyond clear that restricting carry of firearms in towns on a need-basis was common throughout the country's history, and not just in the West (their reasoning for rejecting those examples, I shit you not, was "um, those don't count because they're from one area, never mind it's a giant area"—if it's starting to look like they were playing Calvinball with that ruling, it's because that's exactly what they were doing)
Mostly agree about Constitutional cases. Some of the less sexy statutory construction cases are written for a smaller audience, and even as a lawyer, if you don’t practice in that field, they can be pretty opaque.
Ugh, and the range of clarity from judge to judge is another big factor.
Interesting! How do you rate the different SCOTUS justices in terms of clarity?
I only read the big cases since law school, so take this with a grain of salt -- I've only read one or two KBJ decisions and a handful from Kavanaugh and ACB.
In terms of legal clarity alone, Gorsuch and then Kagan are ahead of the pack by some margin, followed at some distance by Roberts and ACB. Sotomayor is great as a writer, but not in terms of legal clarity. I think Thomas is middle-of-the-pack, and I think he gets underrated in this regard because people dislike his opinions. Again, experience of Kavanaugh and KBJ's writing is limited, but they're at least not far behind the pack here.
Alito stands alone as the only one I'd say is bad for a Supreme Court justice. And that's relative, so it doesn't mean he's awful, but I do actively avoid his writing.
The variance gets way higher the further from SCOTUS you go. At the state level it's basically roulette.
I'd agree with this. Kagan is the best overall, Roberts is up there when he wants to be and isn't forcing it, and yes Thomas writes fairly well but what he writes is abysmal.
Alito is hands down the worst writer and one of the worst to ever sit on the court. He's not the brightest but thinks he's a savant and writes with a smugness and conceit that drips off the page on top of being as disingenuous as they come. Reading anything he writes is torture.
> smugness and conceit that drips off the page
Yeah, when he's like this his writing goes off a cliff. I feel like it peaks any time Sotomayor wrote whatever he's disagreeing with, but that may just be me.
I suppose that they are free to focus on readability when they don't have to structure their writing in order to defend their decision-making from anyone, being the highest court of the land.
A few points to the contrary: The primary purpose for their writing of opinions is not to defend the decisions, but to instruct lower courts on how they should reason on similar cases. So it very much matters on a practical level that their reasoning is sound. Second, if the goal is a cogent, defensible argument, readability is in support of that objective, whereas you suggest that readability is somehow (?) at odds with cogency and defensibility. Thirdly, the justices are keenly aware that the interested public consumes their opinions too, and that they are, in fact, ethically and morally bound to defend their decisions to the public.
> you suggest that readability is somehow (?) at odds with cogency and defensibility
All I am saying is that writing can be clearer and more concise when you don't have to include asides and digressions to preemptively defend it from criticism.
This is a technical point on power dynamics and writing style. When the authors are in a position of power, then they can focus more on readability (and cogency) and less on playing defense, because their court seats are secure for life.
By contrast, justices in lower courts are influenced by organizational politics and must focus more on defensibility, which may come at the expense of clarity.
So I do not find it surprising that the supreme court is able to produce more readable decisions than lower courts, because they have unique incentives.
> The primary purpose for their writing of opinions is not to defend the decisions, but to instruct lower courts on how they should reason on similar cases.
Correct. This is different from lower courts, which also explains why they are able to focus on readability.
They actually do have to, in a sense.
Being the only non-democratically elected branch of government in a democracy, the courts don't enjoy direct approval from the people. So while the structure of the institutions seem to give them power, their authority ultimately hinges on whether people perceive their decisions fair and just.
When courts make unpopular decisions and can't explain why, there's always a risk of some constitutional crisis. If courts keep making decisions that they can't rationally defend, at some point their authority will begin to erode. (And if you followed the USSC rulings in recent years you might start to understand why. Maybe the resentment not yet directly targeted towards the courts, but those decisions did add fuel to the already divisive politics in the US.)
This site is the personal blog of a well-regarded reporter that is a primary contributor to SCOTUSBlog: https://www.scotusblog.com/
All these posts are cross-posted there. If I recall correctly the reason for the cross-post setup has to do with conflict-of-interest avoidance since she is married to the owner of SCOTUSBlog. So you’re probably better off reading that site directly than this one.
Check out the podcast Strict Scrutiny for good coverage of what SCOTUS is up to on a weekly basis: https://crooked.com/podcast-series/strict-scrutiny/
It’s hosted by three con law professors, but they’re all extremely adept at avoiding jargon and explaining how the cases tie back to everyday life.
For those interested, here are some other good resources:
* The Oyez Project has 2 podcasts (really just pure SCOTUS audio): oral arguments and opinion announcements. (SCOTUS justices verbally announce summaries of their written opinions from the bench on the day they are released.) In lieu of links, I advise just searching on your podcatcher of choice.
* The National Constitution Center’s “We The People” podcast is excellent. It’s constitutional-law debate on current topics, but very academic and generally non-partisan. Again, search on your podcatcher.
* Justia provides e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds of opinion releases (summaries and links to the PDF opinions) for both (1) federal appellate courts (SCOTUS and the courts of appeals) and (2) state courts of last resort. There are also weekly newsletters and RSS for opinions by subject area (maritime, bankruptcy, business, etc.). The summaries are … okay. Not terribly well written but they give you enough of an overview to determine whether to pull and read the opinion. Link: https://connect.justia.com/about-daily-summaries
* The federal court websites are generally pretty good and provide their own RSS feeds of opinion releases.
Thanks for this
Hard to take a law podcast seriously when it openly broadcasts a political agenda. The image with Trump with a partisan caption, all the partisan logo T's in the merch shop ("abortion is healthcare", "leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks", etc.). The one linked here and SCOTUSBlog seem much better.
Having a viewpoint isn't a sin. The SCOTUS justices are allowed to rule on cases from a political viewpoint - even if it's euphemistically called a judicial philosophy - so why hold podcasters to a higher standard? At least they're upfront about it and you know what you're in for. That's what people say they like about the president elect.
Just sounds pro-democracy and pro-ethics, of that's an "agenda" then it's a good one. What you've described increases my desire to watch it, not decrease.
Openly calling people "freaks" is not exactly indicative that you can expect that person to be impartial and accurate in their reporting of the facts. Moreover, calling abortion "healthcare" is disingenuous at best. Everyone knows damn well why people oppose abortion, and trying to euphemistically refer to it as healthcare is willfully ignoring the dispute.
I don't know how you can read a story like this one and not conclude that abortion is healthcare. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/25/1171851...
I like knowing someone's bias. It makes it easier to understand their viewpoint whether I agree with it or not. It's the people that claim to be unbiased that worry me the most. While not always true, I suspect them of lying or lacking self-awareness.
I highly recommend Advisory Opinions (https://thedispatch.com/podcast/advisoryopinions/) for legal podcasts.
The two hosts are center-right, but I think their takes are largely pretty fair. Note: Sarah Isgur worked in the Trump Justice Department but is hardly a fan of Trump… again, I find her pretty fair minded).
There are some projects around the world to force lawyers to write in "normal" language. (Which BTW, is how it should be, as we should be able to fully understand the laws that can cost money or send us to jail).
Off topic: does somebody have some update on any such a project? Would be great news to see some important country taking action into it.
I think legalize is the way it is because it requires precision. A lot of the words and phrases that show up in legal documents don't have an easy definition because they're litigated terms. "fair use" isn't just "a justified use of some media", it's a specific pointer that points at a corpus of laws and decisions over decades and decades.
We generally want to be able to assume that the legal system makes similar decisions given similar situations, but the world doesn't hand it precise duplicates. Words that point at specific facts of a situation from the past are always going to be complex. It's not just for describing the situation narratively, it's also got to communicate specific categories of facts. How would we simply communicate that we (western legal tradition for example) care about the fact a murder was planned. What is planning? Is planning a murder a crime, and if not, why does it make the crime of murder worse? "Mens Rea" gives us a pointer to refer to the non-criminal act of having the intention to commit a crime. That's pretty useful, especially when you can CMD+F for that over centuries of people hashing out each case where the mental state of the accused mattered.
I do think there's a case for simplified explanations of legal text, but the source document should probably remain the "real" document.
You absolutely can get precision and plain language at the same time. See, for example, the English text of the GDPR.
The ideal situation is that we only need about half an hour of instruction (saying things much like your second paragraph) before a literate amateur can interpret most laws correctly. That instruction can then be given in schools: it could be lumped in along with all the other miscellanea ("here's how to vote", basic financial literacy, sex-ed, etc).
I'll freely admit to complete ignorance, but this seems like a bad idea.
Much like we use well-defined but somewhat arcane terminology to talk about computers, because precision is important, I'm skeptical about the implications of "plain" language in laws.
Precision and comprehensibility to an uneducated person seem like they would always be at odds.
The laws are basically jargon. There is a good reason behind the wording, it rests on centuries of case law of people hammering out exactly what each work or phrase means exactly, but it does add a layer of obfuscation for the layman. The law is a huge machine, and the laws are the code. Could it be better? Definitely. Lots of decisions were made that were a good idea at the time but are now pain points, but the system is too big to make systematic changes. You have to work within the framework.
> the system is too big to make systematic changes
This seems like a flawed argument to me that if applied would see technology stagnating. The reason it’s flawed is the assumption that the system is at a fixed max size. However, if it’s growing quickly, you can always come up with new systemic ways of doing things that are divorced from the past and over time most of the things are done the new way. You can even refactor/replace the old stuff over time. Law isn’t quite like code which is where this analogy breaks down a bit but something to think about.
In a common law system, like what we use in the USA and most of the Anglosphere, it is impossible to divorce from the past.
I'm not going to fine or send somebody to jail with my computer jargon... that is a huge difference. I'm not agains jargon, in other disciplines, even internally between lawyers in procedures for example. But the law that applies to ME, I have to be able to parse it.
To add to this, language models are now quite good at explaining legalese, so that limits the positive impact of pushing for plainer language.
I would rather laws continue to be written with precision and for the government to have an information portal describing the relevant legal obligations in plain language. Forcing laws themselves to be written in plain language is a recipe for disaster. Imagine the tax code was subject to that constraint, for example. Corporations would have a field day finding loopholes.
Software can also have a huge impact on our lives and I don't think anyone would insist that software must be written so as to be easily understood by people who are not software developers.
As someone who works with legal language regularly, the notion that it's designed for clarity is hilarious. It's often constructed deliberately to obsfucate its purpose. Plain clear language with defined terms is legally binding and difficult to circumvent.
I can understand that, but I don't know if legal texts would be more explicit given simpler language. You can bake ambiguity into any text you want. "Simple english" will naturally just have less words than legalese, since that's the thing people find so daunting about it. Doesn't that mean that either A) words will have multiple overlapping meanings or B) entire phrases will have to be used to explain what is normally 1 word? Either case leaves a lot of room for "offensive lawyering".
Defined legal terms is just what we have now, but starting over.
I specifically said precision and not clarity, which is not the same. The thing is, though, that legal language is not "designed" for anything, in fact it is not "designed" at all.
As for being constructed deliberately to obfuscate its purpose, all I can say is that that's not my experience and it seems like a pretty self-defeating aim to me. For legal language to have any value at all, you have to be reasonably certain that a court would give effect to your intended meaning, and the more you obfuscate your intentions, the bigger the risk that it will be construed in an unintended way by a court.
> Plain clear language with defined terms is legally binding and difficult to circumvent.
As soon as you introduce defined terms, it is instantly less plain and less clear.
Ooh, this is something boring few people know about! There have been many efforts across the US government to simplify the language used in documents. Nixon, Clinton, and Obama all worked on this. Obama actually got a group organized around this, and there are now progress reports available on how the US is doing: https://www.doi.gov/plainlanguage
And a dedicated website for it, with examples useful for many: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/
Check out this Clinton era "No Gobbledygook Award" recipient: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/awards/award-11/
In a common law system, the benefit of the arcane language is that it's been tested in court before, so it has a definite meaning. In that sense, it's actually "clear", even if it's pretty obscure to the layman. By contrast, novel wording has not been tested in previous cases, so no matter how clearly it might be written, there's a degree of uncertainty. A term doesn't have a definite legal meaning until a judge has made a ruling on it. That's why contracts and wills, particularly, often use weird phrasing.
At cursory glance, this and SCOTUSBlog seem pretty reasonable and not captured by the usual unhinged "the court is corrupt" narrative.
It's good to get an uneditorialized view so you can know what's going on without wasting your breath making the same complaints over and over.
But that doesn't mean the complaints are wrong. SCOTUS is an insane, dysfunctional institution.
The premise of judicial review is that if you have ideologically-aligned justices, then any petitioner who disagrees with Congress or the executive can file a lawsuit, hit the appeal button twice, and get SCOTUS to undo the law. The amount of law that is supposedly derived from the (tangentially related) terse sentences of the constitution is immense and, imo, completely unjustifiable.
The court's ability to strike down 100-year-old laws (whether acts of Congress or their own previous decisions), and their ability to effect these changes at times when the legislature is in a more or less favorable position to react, is destabilizing.
Even if this isn't convincing, just look at the farce that is lifetime appointments. Large swaths of our ways of living are dependent on the health, age, and egos of these people. We have had manifestly unfit justices cling on to the bench in hopes that they can retire under a friendly president. We can do better.
Is it really unhinged when more and more corrupt, undocumented, gifts keep getting revealed?
It's partisan. It's no coincidence that the side disagreeing with all the EFFECTS of the decisions (not necessarily even the legal interpretations - those tend not to get addressed) is the one calling it corrupt.
I think there are three components here:
- There is a partisan component when democrats criticize the effect of cases like Dobbs, Janus, and Trump v. USA. This definitely exists.
- There is definitely a legal interpretation component. I heard some good analysis on legal interpretation on NPR around the Chevron deference when Loper v. Raimondo happened. They had on law professors, federal lawyers, and even one of the lawyers who argued the original Chevron case. There was a lot of content educating people on the history of Chevron deference, what it means, and what the new ruling might mean for regulators in the future. I've also seen a lot of discussion poking holes in the unitary executive theory (on the left) and justifying it (on the right). You sometimes have to dig to find this - long discussions on legal theory don't exactly make for compelling media.
- Finally, there is a "corruption on the SCOTUS" component. I would argue that the timing here is partisan, but the material is not. The conflicts of interest documented are factual, and the calls to adopt a code of ethics should have been a nonpartisan issue. Personally, I believe that the GOP learned the wrong lesson from the Nixon impeachment and Bork nomination and has adopted a more doveish stance on balancing political power versus corruption within their party, and the partisan lean of the SCOTUS scandals is a consequence of this.
I'll be upset with liberal justices, too, if evidence turns up that any of them are being bribed on a grand scale by billionaires.
That this is regarded as partisan by anyone is why we're screwed. The revelations about Thomas should have had all of Washington after his head. Nope, it's "partisan" so zero action taken and normal people are even confused enough about it that here we are, having this exchange. If that doesn't scare you, it should.
Plenty of evidence has turned up already? This is just a small smattering of the potential bribes the liberals justices took.
> Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disclosed taking more trips than any other justice in 2018, totaling 14. She visited Tel Aviv, Israel where she was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Genesis Prize Foundation. Shortly following the award ceremony, she disclosed being provided transportation, food and lodging as a tourist and guest of billionaire Israeli businessman Morris Kahn. Companies spawned by Kahn have had had business before the Supreme Court before. The high court handed Amdocs Limited a win in November 2017 when it declined to take up a patent-related case.
> Justice Stephen Breyer disclosed a dozen trips, three of which were supported by the wealthy Chicago-based Pritzker family. Breyer took two trips related to his position on the Pritzker Prize for Architecture jury, which honors architects each year. Breyer has served on the Pritzker jury since 2011 and became chair in 2018. He also disclosed taking a one-week trip to Ireland and Spain as part of the “Pritzker Fly-Around Program,” which paid for his transportation, lodging and meals. Breyer has taken 219 reimbursed trips since 2004, more than any other sitting justice.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/scotus-justices-rac...
Key word: Disclosed
The Republican members weren't disclosing anything, including on their required reporting, until they got caught, years after the fact. There's also tons of just super corrupt stuff, like Harlan Crow buying Clarence Thomas's mothers home for him for above market rate, and letting her continue to live there literally rent free.
There are examples where the liberal justices did not disclose as well.
Sotomayor, for example, failed to disclose receiving a free trip [1]
Jackson failed to disclose stuff as well [2]
There are more examples but it is clear that the liberal justices have failed to disclose stuff and have also been receiving trips from billionaires.
[1] https://fixthecourt.com/2022/06/justice-sotomayor-amends-fin...
[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/09/jacksons-financial-disclo...
You said it was unhinged but now you're pleading it down to merely partisan?
Please, go ahead and explain how this is not corruption: https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishi.... I’m a huge mental gymnastics enthusiast.
Well you see, it's just a gratuity.
> In early July 2008
Ask yourself this: why are you only hearing about this 13 years later? This wasn't a big deal when the allegedly problematic ruling on the hedge fund came down, only when the ruling on Roe v. Wade did.
I won't comment on the factual accuracy of the claims in the article. I haven't investigated them thoroughly, so I don't have an informed opinion on them. But if you want a rebuttal, maybe read the response from Alito linked to in the article? https://www.wsj.com/articles/propublica-misleads-its-readers...
Because "Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures." It was extremely difficult for anyone to find out about this.
Parts of Alito's response are extremely difficult to believe.
> Until a few months ago, the instructions for completing a Financial Disclosure Report told judges that “[p]ersonal hospitality need not be reported,”
Alito intentionally cuts out the rest of this sentence. The law says "except that any food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality of an individual need not be reported". Obviously a private jet flight does not qualify as any of these categories. Why did he ignore that part of the law?
> My recollection is that I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of brief and casual comments at events attended by large groups.
On a multi-day fishing trip with a very small group, where you were personally hosted by Paul Singer, you only made small talk? You flew on his private jet, and were photographed multiple times posing with him in front of a tiny boat or plane that only held a handful of people, so you must have spent many hours with him and only a couple other people. It is completely unbelievable that anybody in this situation with a sitting supreme court justice would only make small talk.
Why did he invite you, if he didn't care about your position as a justice and you barely knew each other?
> when I was invited shortly before the event
Who invited you?
> Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me.
Alito does not address the third option of not going. What was this event and why was it important he attend? He doesn't say.
If the corruption can be revealed, it exists. This is true whether or not the decision to reveal it is biased.
This calls to mind complaints from a few years ago about fact-checking as "damaging to the reputation" of the person whose claims were fact-checked and identified as false.
One's reputation is damaged when they choose to tell a lie, not when someone else points it out.
Similarly, when someone accepts a bribe, they have damaged their integrity. That damage was not done by the person who exposes the bribe, but by the person who chose to accept the bribe.
Put another way: unethical behavior is unethical regardless of whether one gets caught while engaging in it.
Is your assertion that no reporters disliked Alito enough—and/or, that none were career-advancement-motivated enough—to bother reporting on this in 2008, and that's why it was only reported recently?
It seems to me the more likely explanation is that nobody who might be inclined to report on it, knew about it then.
Maybe. But even if that's true, then why did the people "inclined to report on it" only find out about it right after Dobbs?
You could say it was just coincidence, but this isn't the only story making accusations against conservative justices that came out right after the Dobbs decision. I'd say its far more likely the result of opposition research. Which doesn't necessarily mean its not true, just that you should take it with a few extra grains of salt.
> but this isn't the only story making accusations against conservative justices that came out right after the Dobbs decision
I would agree that it appears to be an alarmingly widespread problem.
Of judges being targeted for character assassination after making objectively correct interpretations of the constitution that politicians don't like?
I completely agree.
No, of actual corrupt behavior. Plenty of us would get fired from our jobs for less. Much of what’s happened would get lower justices disciplined, because there are ethics rules with teeth for them.
Do you read Alito’s rebuttal you linked as an actual rebuttal of the events? It reads as a “yeah, sure, but it’s fine, trust me” to me.
>> Plenty of us would get fired from our jobs for less.
No we wouldn’t. The contention that “plenty of us” would be fired for going on a fishing trip is farcical on its face and even more laughable when you consider how much is given away in the private sector for “business development” or “marketing” reasons.
We get it. You don’t like the conservative justices. There’s no reason to start making ridiculous statements that make you look like an ideological chicken little. While you’re all over this thread hating on Alito and Thomas, I don’t see you saying much about Kagan and Breyer. Why is that?
> No we wouldn’t. The contention that “plenty of us” would be fired for going on a fishing trip is farcical on its face
If someone did business with our company and I was in any way connected with decisions regarding that, and it turned out they’d spent tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on gifts for me, yeah, I would, even if there was no straight line between the gifts and them later getting what they want, and even if I said I didn’t know, because I should have known. And there are industries with far more scrutiny and stricter rules than the one I’m in. Millions of employees are in the same boat.
These aren’t branded bic pens or a box of doughnuts. C’mon. What’s farcical is pretending this isn’t naked corruption that would get smacked down despite any protestations of “lol it’s fine, trust me” or “oh sorry I didn’t know” from the perpetrators in any other context.
> While you’re all over this thread hating on Alito and Thomas, I don’t see you saying much about Kagan and Breyer. Why is that?
Because the topic has been Alito, and because the known gifts the two you name have received in the last 20 years are under $20,000 combined while Alito’s alone is 10x their combined total(!) and Thomas has received gifts amounting to at least $4m(!!!) in the same time frame. There are two outliers and they both happen to be Republicans, who also have both failed to report really large gifts, not just “whoops I forgot about that $50 lunch”
Let’s absolutely audit the shit out of all of them, I’m entirely on board. Let’s get an investigation right up in these too-powerful-to-touch folks’ finances and see what we find for all of them. Definitely would love to see that. Several of the sub-six-figure gift totals seem too high, too. Drag them all before Congress, subpoena their bank records, by all means, and to all of them, sure.
But what we know now is that two are exceptionally-bad even by lax Supreme Court standards. Maybe more are, too, and I’d say what we know already is enough that they should all have their lives turned upside down to see how far this goes.
>> If someone did business with our company and I was in any way connected with decisions regarding that, and it turned out they’d spent tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on gifts for me, yeah, I would, even if there was no straight line between the gifts and them later getting what they want, and even if I said I didn’t know, because I should have known. And there are industries with far more scrutiny and stricter rules than the one I’m in. Millions of employees are in the same boat.
Nahhh.
>> Because the topic has been Alito
You elsewhere in this comment section: “I'll be upset with liberal justices, too, if evidence turns up that any of them are being bribed on a grand scale by billionaires.”
Your partisanship is showing.
> Nahhh
Y—yes, though? I’m dead certain I’d be out the door over that. It’s a pretty common set of policies and that wouldn’t be considered a grey area, or even in sight of a grey area. I’d need serious company-politics pull to have any hope. Have you worked for large companies? Small ones may not emphasize this as much (the ones I’ve been at didn’t)
> You elsewhere in this comment section: “I'll be upset with liberal justices, too, if evidence turns up that any of them are being bribed on a grand scale by billionaires.”
Yes. Got something you want to bring up? Not sure if the relevance of your quoting me there to any of the rest of this, but if you’re trying to broach that topic, absolutely, show me the reporting.
> Your partisanship is showing.
I’m beginning to think this isn’t exactly a good faith discussion, though.
Yeah SCOTUSBlog is great. NYT reporting on lower profile cases is often really great too. For higher profile cases I agree coverage is dominated by partisan concerns and discussing the outcomes rather than the law.
I was going to recommend SCOTUSBlog and then I noticed it's the same person...
https://www.scotusblog.com/
Volokh Conspiracy is also great
https://reason.com/volokh/
Out of curiosity, are all courts in the US required to publish transcripts or videos? It would be interesting to have bots processing those feeds to keep tabs on what is going on.
https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/federal-court-report...
Federal courts transcribe everything and the transcripts are generally possible to obtain although in some cases the transcripts are not free. State courts vary.
Availability of videos or audio recordings varies even more by jurisdiction.
Practically all published judicial material is a public record (although only under the 1st Amend, generally not under FOIA laws).
The problem is that a great number of state courts (which is the majority of courts in the USA) use shitty outdated systems and don't have Internet access to their records. Or they heavily restrict access to only attorneys.
The records are public, though, so if there is some specific you want, you can get it. It just might take some effort.
See also the Advisory Opinions podcast if you like to consume your analysis of court arguments and opinions by listening.
Honestly, ChatGPT and Claude can tldr more than good enough for government work. Plus you can ask follow-up questions.