Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion for today’s Obamacare decision; the majority opinion upheld the Affordable Care Act. But, it appears that Scalia thought he was in the majority at the time he wrote the opinion, used terminology appropriate to that situation (referring to the other opinion as the dissent) and then forgot to change the text.
This is a little scary for two or three reasons. One, it looks like this may have been a very close decision. If Romney is elected, the USA might as well fold up shop. Two, Antonin Scalia and his staff are on drugs or something. Three, if the Supreme Court can mess up the language of documents that control the law like this, cats will soon be sleeping with dogs.
The astonishing details are here at Brad DeLong’s blog.
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I’m normally sympathetic to your posts Greg, but this one isn’t really very fair. 1) Ginsburg’s opinion *was* a dissent, on a significant number of issues, and it’s perfectly appropriate for the joint dissent to refer to it as such. 2) Scalia didn’t have sole authorship of the joint dissent, it was a joint dissent with Kennedy, Alito and Thomas. Thomas also wrote a separate individual dissent.
Grad student: I’m normally sympathetic to your comments, and you may well be right. But you should bring this up with Brad, probably, because he probably knows how to address your concerns better than I do.