Correct me if I’m wrong, but ISTM that this is the ends against the middle - the 3 most conservative justices with 3 of the most liberal against a more moderate makeup of dissenters (give or take one, perhaps).
What would account for this? Perhaps the case is completely unrelated to any sort of judicial philosophy. Or is there a philosophy shared by both extremes against the middle that manifests itself in certain cases?
Or perhaps the premise is incorrect to begin with.
Obviously, when hot button social issues are at stake, most of us can predict VERY accurately where Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito will come out. And we can very accurately figure out where Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer and Ginsburg will come out. Anthony Kennedy is invariably the wild card.
But when we’re dealing with business law, contract law, property rights, et al., ideology frequently doesn’t come into play at all. Hence, it’s not at all unusual for conservative justices to vote with liberal in these kinds of cases.
There are a lot of unanimous 9-0 votes on cases the public at large rarely hears or cares about, in which the right and left wings both agree that the text of the law is clear and unexceptional. And there are a lot of cases in which a liberal judge may find himself or herself in agreement with the conservative bloc, and at odds with his/her perceived allies.
If corporation A claims that corporation B has infringed on its copyright, what’s the “liberal” or “conservative” position on such matters? IS there an ideological position you’d expect Sotomayor or Alito to take on suhc a case? Not really. So, voting coalitions can easily shift in cases like these.
It seems to me that you have the bleeding hearts siding with an individual against a big corporation, the formalists saying the law says this so we have to follow the law, and the pragmatists worrying about possible complications to other copyright holders.