Is this considered a Supreme Court majority opinion, or a plurality?

Factual Questions
1

I’m reading a fractious Fourth Amendment decision from the 80s (Walter v. US if u must know), and wondering how to describe the first opinion.

It is authored by Justice Stevens and joined only by Justice Stewart. There is a concurrence in the judgment (no comment attached) from Justice Marshall. There is a concurrence in the judgment by Justice White, joined by Justice Brennan.

There is a four justice dissent authored by justice blackmun.

So, is the two-judge opinion by Stevens the “majority”, because it’s 2 +1 +2? Or is it the plurality, because it’s 2 but won anyway due to the three concurrences?

Is there any other useful name for this?

For background on why I ask, a later decision (4 years later, appropriately in 1984) also authored by Stevens (us v. Jacobsen) would refer back to this one, saying there was “no opinion for the court,” and combine the two-justice what-should-i- call-it with the four-justice dissent to MacGyver a rule amounting to a new and troubling exception to the Fourth Amendment. The latter decision is a lot of sleight of hand, crafting a majority out of two opposing sides of a decision with drastically different rationales to claim a consistent rule that is in no way supported by the two-judge majority(?) decision or its concurrences.

That artificial majority crafted a rule for the “private search doctrine”, stating that when a private party searches through your stuff, reasonably or not, legally or not, you have no expectation of privacy in that stuff, and so police can do the same without a warrant or probable cause up until the point they “exceed the scope” of the original private search.

I think it’s bullshit, and would like to write about it being bullshit for a law review Note. But I’d like to use the right words to describe the misappropriated two-Justice… thingie. Help me, teeming masses, I know half of you are lawyers and the rest of you know more about it than 2 years at a top law school have given me!

2

I would say that it was a majority for the outcome of the case at hand, but that it may or may not be a majority on any of the points of law that led to that outcome. Whether the later court’s interpretation of precedent was correct then depends on what point of law it was referring back to.

3

Hmm… That’s pretty much how I was seeing it, but unfortunately doesn’t leave me with a useful one-word referent to the two-judge decision. It’s not exactly the opinion of the court… Guess it’s the “Stevens opinion.”

4

I would say no, because the majority was simply in the outcome of the case, with no majority in the reasons.

The head-note says:

That clearly distinguishes between the judgment of the Court (i.e. the outcome of the appeal) and the opinion by Stevens,which is only for him and Stewart. There is no majority on the legal points.

5

It makes one wonder why the Stevens/Stewart opinion gets to announce the decision as opposed to the white/Brennan concurrence. The tiebreaker, Marshall, didn’t write anything at all, concurring only in the judgment. Did they flip a coin?

6

The judgement was 5-4. Stevens was assigned (presumably by the Chief Justice) to write the opinion for the majority. The fact that the majority did not join in his opinion does not change that, and neither does a separate concurrence.

7

The Chief Justice only assignes if he is also in the majority. Please reread Northern Pipers post. He is a lawyer.

8

In Marks v. United States, 430 U.S. 188 (1977), the Court explained:

Sussing out the “narrowest grounds” is not always an easy task. In general, though, there are two frameworks by which these grounds may be determined. The most obvious is identifying a simple legal avouchment that would compel a result acceptable to five justices who concurred in the result. If this cannot be identified, then perhaps there can be found a single shared line of reasoning which the majority opinions share.