Reading about Lawrence v. Texas, I found this tidbit that piqued my curiosity.
In this particular case, the Supreme Court was 6-3 in favor of striking the Texas sodomy law down, so O’Connor’s opinion was largely moot. But it occurs to me; what happens if the majority of the SCOTUS can’t agree? For instance, O’Connor might have been the 5th, not the 6th, justice to decide in favor of Lawrence, and therefore the court would have struck down the Texas law without the majority agreeing on the rationale for doing so. Has such a “split decision” occurred in the history of the court? And what are/would be the consequences of such a thing, in terms of legal precedents set by the decision?
Insofar as deciding the particular case before them, what Simplicio said.
But in terms of enunciating a legal principle (“separate but equal” won’t cut it; freedom of autonomy in private associations trumps vice statutes) you need a majority of justices united on a given principle. Note that this principle can be found in the decision of the court plus concurrences or even plus dissents; the content will reveal whether the pricniple commands a majority or not.,
There is a distinction between the judgment of the Court, and the reasons for the judgment, which can get muddled.
The judgment of the Court is the actual outcome: appeal allowed or dismissed.
The reasons are the explanation for that decision. In most cases, one justice writes the reasons that attract the support of a majority of the justices, but that is not required. In theory, you could have five justices agreeing to allow an appeal, but each giving contradictory reasons.
Where one justice does have a majority on the reasons, those reasons are stated to be the judgment of the Court.
And, to answer explicitly one of the OP’s questions, it happens all the time. Very often, there is a combination of opinions that concur in the decision, but do not agree on the rationale.
There are a couple of significant cases where this has happened.
National Mutual Ins. Co. v. Tidewater Transfer Co. had to do with the scope of the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Article III of the Constitution says that one of the categories of cases that can be brought in the federal courts are cases arising between “citizens of different states”; i.e., when a citizen of one state sues a citizen of another. This is called “diversity” (of citizenship) jurisdiction.
To be clear, a person can always sue in federal court if there is a federal law at issue, no matter where the other party lives. Diversity jurisdiction allows a plaintiff to sue in federal court under state law, if and only if the defendant being sued is someone from another state. (This was included because the federal courts were considered to be a potentially more neutral site than the state court’s of one party’s home state.)
The District of Columbia, however, is not a state. And so in 1804 the Supreme Court ruled that a resident of DC could not invoke diversity jurisdiction to sue in federal court. This was the law until 1940, when Congress decided that this anomaly was unfair, and it passed a statute expressly extending diversity jurisdiction to DC.
The constitutionality of Congress’s expansion of diversity jurisdiction was then challenged, and it went to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled 5-4 to uphold the statute and allow the suit to proceed, but no one’s reasoning garnered a majority. Two justices voted to permit the suit to proceed because they believed that the 1804 ruling was wrong, and that DC should be considered a state for purposes of that part of Article III (and the other seven rejected that theory). Three justices voted to permit the suit to proceed because they believed that, while the 1804 decision was correct, Congress had the power to change it by statute (and the other six rejected that theory).
So, the two plus the three amounted to five votes to let the suit proceed, even though seven justices rejected one theory and six rejected the other. To this day, DC residents may invoke diversity jurisdiction in federal court, but their legal authority for doing so remains wholly undetermined.
One of the badly split Supreme Court of Canada decisions was R. v. Rahey. Of the 9 justices, there were four decisions, each with 2 judges supporting, and the 9th justice died while the case was pending and did not participate. So there was a unanimous decision to allow the appeal, but 4 sets of reasons as to why the Court did so, with no majority.
Fortunately, in subsequent cases the Court has returned to the issue in Rahey (pre-trial delay) and issued more coherent decisions.
In the U.S. Supreme Court, the appeal was already allowed - the case was already accepted - with the granting of certiorari. The outcome is whether the lower court’s ruling is affirmed or reversed.
very much so. In Canadian law, certiorari is not an appeal, but a prerogative writ that only lies to courts of limited jurisdiction and administrative agencies. It doesn’t lie to superior courts. Our Supreme Court is a general court of appeal. However, I understand why it is used by the US Supreme Court, which is not a general court of appeal.
Well, Elendil’s Heir said this: “In the U.S. Supreme Court, the appeal was already allowed - the case was already accepted - with the granting of certiorari.” That is not what certiorari means in Canadian law. Here, the equivalent is “leave to appeal granted”, but that does not mean the appeal was allowed.
Yes, that was the misunderstanding. He thought that “appeal was allowed” meant the same as “leave to appeal was granted.” Before the U.S. Supreme Court, the equivalent is “the petition for a writ of certiorari was granted.”
As others have hinted at, when a majority agrees only on the outcome, but not on the reasoning, only the outcome is binding and the reason is still up in the air. Since you mentioned Lawrence, let’s pretend that Kennedy sided with the 3, so that you had 4 ruling to strike the law down because of substantive due process, 1 (O’Connor) voting to strike the law because of equal protection, and 4 voting to uphold the law.
The only takeaway would be that the Texas sodomy law was constitutional as is. The make up of the court could then perhaps invite Texas (or other states) to rewrite a sodomy law that applied to homosexual and heterosexual people to address O’Connor’s concern, and hope that when that made it back up, O’Connor would side with the other 4 in upholding that law.
But since, as you noted, there were 5 saying that sodomy laws violate substantive due process PERIOD, then that holding carries over to any other attempts to get the law passed through the (hehe) back door.
The binding precedent is what a majority agrees upon. In the hypothetical 5-4 Lawrence decision with Kennedy on the other side, the only thing you could point to that 5 justices agreed upon would be that the Texas sodomy law, as written, was unconstitutional. Anything else would have still been yet to be decided.
