The current term of the United States Supreme Court is drawing to a close, so the Atlantic's website ran a list of the best dissent that each justice has filed.
In case a little "Supreme Court for Dummies" is helpful: Since there are nine judges on the court, at least five of them must agree to rule for or against. Then they write an opinion. One opinion explains the majority's decision; the dissenters write another; and sometimes a justice disagrees with minor points of the colleagues' opinions enough to write his or her own. Each remaining judge joins the opinion which best fits his or her understanding of the case.
A long time ago I read former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor's Majesty of the Law. She explains that Chief Justices have historically had very different views about achieving a decision; one or two were obsessed with forging a consensus, which extorted uneasy compromises, and others couldn't care much less about whether the decision was 5-4 or 8-1 as long as there was a decision. This term, around 48% of the rulings were unanimous, 28% were 5-4.
During the past three or so months I haunted the Court's website and scrolled through a couple rulings; the dissent I remember is Sonia Sotomayor's challenge to the majority ruling in United States v. Jicarilla Apache Nation. American constitutional law and the circumstances of this particular case are beyond the scope of my amateur legal erudition; so the following may be a complete mischaracterization of the case:
From a human rather than judicial perspective I thought that Sotomayor was right. The issue basically seemed to be that the U.S. government exercises a kind of statutory guardianship over Native Americans. But wards in the traditional sense have much freer access to details of how their legal representation is being run. So the government's lack of transparency and accountability to others is getting in the way of properly pursuing it in the courts where there is reason to believe that it has abused its role. I don't know if the system is really that claustrophobic and defined by Catch-22s, but then I see no foundation for optimism. But Sotomayor's taking up the gauntlet was rather heartwarming.
"I Dissent: A Different Kind of Supreme Court Term Review" [Atlantic], by Andrew Cohen (June 28, 2011)
O'Connor, Sandra Day, The Majesty of the Law (Random House, 2003)
United States v. Jicarilla Apache Nation [Supreme Court], decided June 13, 2011 [PDF format; Justice Sotomayor's dissent from p. 31]
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