Is there anything other than tradition and, hopefully, good sense which prevents the SCOTUS from tacking an opinion onto a decision for an unrelated case? For example, in Smith v. Jones, about two farmers arguing about water rights, could the court say, “we find for Smith and also the 22nd amendment means that the current office holder can run for President forever”? Then, when President Brown files to run again, if he did, no one could stop him, except the court reversing their relevant opinion in Smith?
Hopefully, the justices who joined the majority would be impeached and sent someplace nice where they could get the help they need, but this scenario is at least hypothetically possible, is it not?
They can and regularly do include comments about questions not before the court, or about questions that are moot because of the answer they have already given to some earlier question. A comment of this kind is called an obiter dictum (“incidental statement”) and it doesn’t form part of the binding precedent. It would usually have some connection with the subject matter or facts of the case, though.
Although not binding on any court, depending on who said it and how well-reasoned it is a dictum can have considerable persuasive authority, and other courts may adopt them even though not bound to.
So would this fall in the similar category to decisions from other jurisdictions, etc. as a supporting argument in later case shoud a lawyer want to quote it, but not binding then?
Right. The decision or ruling that has the force of law is the decision or ruling on the controversy before the Court.
As it is, the perception I get often is that the most quotable dicta tend to be in partial concurrences and dissents, as they lend more opportunities to ramble. A majority ruling/decision is usually all about the case at hand and as UDS1 indicated, any extraneous commentary in it will be at least somehow tied to the general subject.
Is there such a thing as a binding obiter dictum? Could it completely neglect to provide any reasoning and still be a valid precedent? IOW, would the 5th circuit have to say “While we think the SCOTUS is high AF, our hands are tied.” Or would the 5th circuit court say, “the SCOTUS is sniffing glue” and rule President Jones is ineligible to be on the ballot, only to have SCOTUS rule an hour later on an emergency appeal, “We meant what we said. The 5th circuit can go fuck itself.”?
I would think in that bizarre circumstance it would be the court putting out notice “please, someone, bring us a case about this… and another case of that stuff we were smoking.”
Obiter dicta by definition aren’t binding; if they were binding they wouldn’t be obiter. But they can, as I said, be very influential, and if a dictum is later adopted in another case where is it directly in point, then it becomes part of the ratio (the binding bit) of the court hearing the second case.
The more tangentially related a dictum is to the case before the court, and the less it has to do with the facts considered by, and the arguments put to, the court, the less influential it is likely to be. So in your hypothetical example, a lower court could say “Justice Lunatic’s comment in such-and-such a case about the 22nd amendment is clearly obiter, we don’t it persuasive and we are not adopting it”.
So, the determination that it’s obiter is up to a lower court hearing a case that’s on point? What if the original SCOTUS opinion says “oh, and by the way, this is not obiter dictum. It should be considered binding precedent by all lower courts in the United States.”? Can a concurrence do this as well?
It would be revolutionary for the Supreme Court to assert that it could issue a binding rule on a question not raised by a case before it. That starts to look a lot like the legislative power, which of course is vested in the legislature, not the judiciary. So, yeah, you’re in constitutional coup d’etat territory there.
In some circumstances there may be some limited scope to elevate what would otherwise be a dictum to the level of binding precedent. Suppose a case before the court raises two questions:
A. Is zero a number?
B. If zero is a number, is it an odd number or an even number, or can it be meaningfully classified in those terms?
(Assume that the party bringing the case to the Supreme Court will only get the outcome they want if zero is an odd number.)
If the answer to question A is “no”, then question B doesn’t arise, and any comments the court makes about the oddness or evenness of zero will be obiter. So the court can say “we find that zero is not a number, but we think that even if it were a number it would be an even number”. The second part of that statement is obiter.
But if the court really wants to make a biding ruling about the nature of zero, it can rule that zero is even. It then doesn’t matter whether zero is a number or not because, if it is a number, it’s an odd number. So the court says “we find that zero is even so, if it is a number, it’s an even number. We don’t need to find whether it’s a number or not.”
The example is not a great one because I’ve tried to make it too abstract, but there are many cases in which two questions are before the court, and the answer to either of them can make the other moot. Thus the court can choose which question it wants to make a binding ruling on.
But none of this opens the way for the court to make a binding ruling about a question not before the court at all.
That’s the crux of my question. Is there anything to actually stop them from doing this besides impeachment? Such a ruling may well be overturned by.a subsequent decision, but in the interim, we get dogs and cats living together. But if one party took control over one house and ideologically aligned justices were to make such a ruling, such a ruling would likely stand until at least the next Congress, right?
If Congress had refused to certify the 2020 election as the Jan 6 protestors wanted, would that constitutional coup have succeeded? I think the brute reality is that coups, constitutional or otherwise, succeed unless enough people resist them, if not by force then by refusing to accept them, by passive resistance and by non-violent methods.
The Supreme Court doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t even have a police force. It just has the US Marshals Service, and even that is under the direction of the executive, not the judiciary. So how would they enforce their ruling? The question you’re asking comes down to this; if the Supreme Court were to make a blatantly unconstitutional ruling as part of a plan to overthrow the republic, would Congress and the Presidency acquiesce? Or would they resist, and by what means? We won’t really know unless it happens.
Which leads to the scenario that has played out in countless other countries.
The executive is captured by one party or one person. Who then stacks the court while the court continues to operate generally within ordinary bounds. The executive also succeeds via various evil means in suppressing opposition parties in the legislature until they have a large majority there too. Meanwhile the high court mostly avoids ruling on any legal protests about the throttling of the opposition.
Soon enough all three branches belong to one party or one person. Then the trap is sprung and the law is whatever the three branches say it is. Regardless of which branch issues the initial announcement, the others go along in lockstep. Because they are all now wholly-owned subsidiaries of the insiders of the ruling party. Or of the Supreme Leader himself.
It’s all monstrously wrong, and flies in the face of constitutionalism regardless of which constitution we’re discussing. It’s the wholesale subversion of the organs of government.
The remedy is often armed insurrection 20 or 30 years later after the ruling coterie’s giga-scale graft has strangled the economy so badly that the peasants have nothing much to lose by burning the capital.