I think that it’s evident to most that the current Court is highly polarized and divided. If the Court issues a unanimous opinion reversing(*) an Appeals Court(**), does the judge who wrote the appellate ruling feel rebuked in some manner? Or does the SCOTUS ever attempt to make it clear they think the lower opinion was from somewhere over the rainbow? I’ve seen dissenting opinions that strongly disagree w/ the majority opinion, but the majority opinion usually seems more sedate.
Thanks.
*I’m operating under the assumption that, given the viewpoints represented on the current SCOTUS, a unanimous opinion from them has to be agreed to by multiple, opposing legal views: activist, constructionist, liberal, conservative, etc.
**Just FTR, I’m thinking about a decision from the 5th, rather than the 9th Circuit.
A judge who gets reversed usually thinks somewhere from the continuum of “oh well, it’s an area of the law where reasonable minds could differ” to “those idjits wouldn’t know the law if it came up and bit them on the ass.” Sharp rebukes are really rather uncommon, especially when there’s no “wrongdoing” on the part of the lower judge and it’s merely a ruling the appelate court disagrees with. The closest recent thing I can think of is a unanimous SCOTUS decsion overruling Judge Posner in a search and seizure case that wryly acknowledged his “imaginative” ruling, or some such.
Who wrote the 5th Circuit opinion? There’s a small chance I could know the judge.
The joke in legal circles is that when a judge reads a decision from an appellate body that starts “In a thoughtfully-written opinion, Judge Smith found that…”, he immediately knows he’s being reversed.