It seems like every time the Supreme Court releases a decision, the reporters have to read through it and figure out what it’s saying. Some reporters messed up with the Affordable Care Act decision as a I recall. Does the Court release a summary of what the majority opinion decided with their ruling and if not, why not? It would seem to make things so much easier with court watchers if they would.
The Supreme Court doesn’t issue a summary because… well, because they just don’t. That’s not what they do. There are headnotes, but they can be less than crystal-clear. It’s up to the SCOTUS-beat or legal affairs reporters, who are usually pretty legally savvy, to skim a just-released decision and describe in lay terms what the court has done. Sometimes that leads to mistakes, esp. where the reporters are on camera and under pressure as they’re trying to describe the decision. ISTR that reporters covering the release of the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, and the Obamacare decision last summer, initially goofed as to what the holdings were in their haste to be first to break the story.
I have to take issue with you Elendil’s Heir. In almost every case, the Supreme Court does issue a summary, known as the syllabus, in the official report.
For instance, in a decision issued today: AGENCY FOR INT’L DEVELOPMENT v. ALLIANCE FOR OPEN SOCIETY INT’L, INC., the first three pages are the syllabus which summarizes the majority opinion in detail and notes which justices joined in the opinion and who issued concurrences and dissents. The syllabus always has a note saying:
As you can see from the link, the syllabus itself is usually pretty dense, and can take some time to read through , and more importantly, to parse correctly (and this was a relatively straightforward decision).
I think you’re both right. However, I think what **Elendil’s Heir **would consider a summary is a lot shorter than the syllabus. One or two sentences, rather than a few pages.
IANAL, but didn’t the headnote in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad actually suggest something that may not have been decided by the court? The headnote in that case said that the court decided that corporations were persons for purposes of the fourteenth amendment, but the court didn’t actually say that.
Yes. The OP was asking about something more useful for reporters and laypeople at a glance.
I don’t think there’s anyway to simplify it more then the syllabus. Cases often have multiple parts with the court finding for different side on each part. The ACA is a good example. Plus, if you really want to know who “won” right away, you can usually just flip to the bottom of the Syllabus and see who joined the decision. The ACA decsion had Robert’s joining with the liberal justices, and the conservatives writing dissents. You don’t really need to be a lawyer to figure out just from that who was going to be happy with the ruling and who wasn’t.
Summarizing it for laypeople is what reporters are supposed to do. Seems kinda silly to summarize it for the reporters because they can’t wait two minutes to have a lawyer read through a four pages of syllabus with extra large margins.
For really important, complicated cases, that would be a disservice – and yes, the news media do a disservice by turning the decision into a tweet-length newscrawl blurb. I’d worry that even a two-paragraph abstract would NOT be done in “plain English”, but would rather pack the legalese so even more densely that it would warp time.
Exactly. Neither the Court nor its Clerk are copy editors for the mass media, and they will not publish a summary so abridged that it risks missing an important point of Law. The syllabus IMO is a good enough short version of the case for an *educated layman who’s got the rest of lunch break to pore over it and is not in a rush to say something about it within the next 90 seconds. That’s the news outlet’s problem(), not the Court’s.
(*and that of the audience who tunes out if the explanation takes more than thirty seconds)
But that is what the OP is asking, not what you - or the court - think is an appropriately-nuanced syllabus.
Logically A summary could would be incorrect…
If they did a summary it would make the full version redudant, as the summary would be taken to be “the decision”. Even if they put the warning “This is just a summary”, another court would still be forced to treat the summary as correct.
So they don’t do summaries. Except on criminal things, because its ok to incorrectly simplify a situation when its a person the police want to call a criminal…
Also the supreme court would make the decisions writeup very complicated, to ensure that they keep their jobs. They wouldn’t want to say “after running the case for 10 months, the decision was quite simple, took us 5 minutes…”.
I’m fascinated. How exactly would they lose their jobs if they didn’t make the summary complicated?
While we’re at it, exactly how many non-complicated, decide in 5 minutes cases are heard by the Supreme Court on an annual basis? And name all the cases in which the court decides a person’s innocence or guilt so calling a person a criminal would depend upon them and describe how they summarize them. That fascinates me as well.
The OP asked if the Court released a summary of the majority opinion, as an alternative to having to read through the whole decision. The answer is yes, the Decision is prefaced with a Syllabus, which gives a short summary of the opinion.
I didn’t look for other examples, but as I recall, the example in post 3 is a representative of how syllabuses/syllabi are structured. It’s outlined basically. After the part where they summarize the facts it says
It then goes on to give you a breakdown of that summary in part (a)-©. So that really is a one sentence summary rather than 3 pages.
The Supreme Court of Canada will do a media lock-up for important cases, provided the parties consent to it.
When there’s a lock-up, accredited media reps come to the SCC building, discard all their electronics, and are literally locked into a room with a court staffer who gives them the decision and explains it. The media folk have an hour to digest it, and to write their stories. Then, when the hour’s up, the locked door is opened and they all rush out to file their stories.
There are 3 reporter series; S.Ct; U.S. reports, and Lawyers editions. The Lawyers editions have individual attorney commentary on the cases, as a summary if you will.
More to the point, the headnotes aren’t prepared by the Court, they don’t come out with the Court’s opinion, and they don’t go into the official report (the United States reports, cited as “U.S.”). The headnotes are added by editors of the privately published reports, the Supreme Court reports (“S. Ct.”) and the Lawyers Edition (“L. Ed.”), which are released days or weeks after the opinion is released.
The issue with that opinion, if I recall correctly, was that Chief Justice Roberts read the opinion aloud from the bench, and the media were reporting what he was saying as he read it. Thus, when he began the opinion by explaining that the Affordable Care Act was not a valid exercise of the Commerce Clause, the media reported that fact – without waiting to hear him say that the Act was a valid exercise of the taxing power. The problem was not that the reporters had seen or read the whole opinion, and simply gotten it wrong; the problem was that the reporters had not seen the whole opinion, and began drawing conclusions too quickly from the first, incomplete piece that they heard.
Hmm - I find that odd, again from a Canadian perspective. The SCC provides a headnote for all of its decisions, released as an integral part of the decision. The reporter series then use the official SCC headnote.