I thought I’d follow up briefly on Lyle’s blog post on the Chief Justice’s opinion in the Martin attorney’s fees case. The most notable thing to me was not the opinion itself, which certainly is very well done, but the way the Chief Justice delivered it. A number of Justices seem in recent years to have been making considerable efforts to make their public announcements of the opinions more readily understandable to the lay audience in the courtroom. That’s particularly true of Justice Breyer, and Justice Ginsburg even makes her summaries publicly available.
Chief Justice Roberts took that helpful practice to another level today, in my opinion. He put the technicalities of the case and the relevant precedents almost entirely to the side and tried to frame the case in the most basic terms possible. For example, he explained that the Court sometimes applies a strong presumption in favor of attorney’s fees, but they didn’t think that approach made sense because Congress made removal an option and wouldn’t have wanted to discourage it too much. On the other hand, the Court sometimes applies a strong presumption against attorney’s fees, but they didn’t think that approach made sense because Congress clearly intended them to be available. So the Court adopted a middle ground looking to the reasonableness of the removing party’s conduct.
The summary probably could be understood by the various tourists in the gallery, which is saying something for a technical and not-too-sexy case.
One other point is worth mentioning. The Martin case was argued less than a month ago (by a day), so Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg have real competition now for the title of fastest opinion writer.
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