Opinion Authorship Predictions
on Jun 5, 2007 at 2:26 pm
In this post, I gave my best guess on the authorship of various opinions. So far, I’ve been right (i.e., lucky): Justice Alito wrote Ledbetter and Justice Souter wrote Safeco/Geico. The prediction of the Chief writing in the race cases is also fairly obvious.
I have my doubts, though, about my sense that Justice Stevens was writing Rita / Claiborne. Jason’s revised stat pack notes that Justice Stevens wrote two majority opinions in Brewer and Abdul-Kabir in January (a point I had missed). That tips the scales in favor of Justice Breyer writing at least one of the opinions in the sentencing cases, which were argued in February; as of that time, he had not written two majorities in a single sitting, so it would not make sense to leave him out of opinion authorship in February.
Claiborne, of course, has now been dismissed. Given the new SG filing just noted by Lyle, it will be interesting to see if the Court elects to decide the Claiborne issue just through broad language in Rita or instead to grant and expedite an alternative vehicle and issue a separate opinion. (A third option would be to defer deciding the Claiborne question until at least next Term.)
There is obviously no way to know whether Justice Breyer had a majority in Rita, in Claiborne, or both. So, the best I can do is change my prediction to say that Breyer will write for a majority.
Correction: I originally predicted that Justice Stevens would write Claiborne / Rita and that Breyer would write Hein. (In the original version of this post I said that I was “sticking” with a prediction of Justice Thomas writing Hein, which is doubly wrong: it wasn’t my prediction, and doesn’t make much sense because Thomas had two opinions in the previous sitting.) This creates a dilemma — you can say confidently that Breyer had a majority opinion in February. It could be Rita or Hein, but could have been Claiborne. With no real way at all of knowing, I’m going to predict that the Chief Justice is writing Hein and that Justice Breyer is writing Rita.
