Two Excursions into Current U.S. Supreme Court Opinion-Writing

Abstract

In the last weeks in June, 2015, as the present term of the U.S. Supreme Court drew to a close, many controversial and important decisions were handed down by the Court. The substance of the decisions has been written about extensively. Two of the decisions in particular, though, caught my eye as a teacher of legal techniques, not for the importance of the subject of the particular decision, but for what they may illustrate in a teachable fashion about at least some opinion writing. The two cases are Ohio v. Clark (June 18, 2015) interpreting the Confrontation Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and King v. Burwell (June 25, 2015) interpreting a critical provision of the Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare, establishing national health care insurance in the U.S.). In my “excursions” into these opinions here, I am not directly concerned with the merits or desirability of the decisions.

Keywords: Supreme Court, Obamacare, Confrontational Clause, opinion-writing, criminal law, constitutional law

JEL Classification: K00, K30, K39