A repository of great dissenting voices raised against fascism, transphobia, racism, Christian nationalism, and more.
Supreme Court decisions are among the most consequential things the U.S. government, such as it is, does. How it's supposed to work is the Legislative Branch creates the laws, the Executive Branch enforces them, and the Judicial Branch interprets them. Yes, that's overly simplistic, but it's broadly true. The Supreme Court is the "last word" on what the laws mean. It's not always easy to read the decisions "recreationally" unless you're a law geek, student, or need a quick way to fall asleep.
Yes I'm biased. Yes I have very strong opinions on the outcome of the cases covered here. Take the name of the site as your first piece of evidence for that. But I won't alter the text to make the "liberal" justices sound better, I won't put words in their mouths, nor will I alter the words of the "conservative" justices the opposite way. I want to let their words speak for themselves.
Here I provide the syllabi and dissents from some recent very consequential decisions. The text is intact, and few edits have been made from the versions I got: some tweaks to whitespace, and I did correct what seemed to be one typo so far, as I expect when the opinion is officially published this will be cleaned up.
I want you to be able to choose what you want to see.
By default, the internal citations are omitted, but that is a display setting, and one can change that by ticking a box.
By default, brackets around characters or words that have been altered so a quotation would fit a sentence have been hidden.
If I have selected any particularly "juicy" text as a pull-quote, those are displayed by default.
If I have added any commentary, that is also displayed by default.
Choose the font face and font size you want to read the decisions in. I know some people are particular about that. I'd like to find a comprehensive list of fonts that are used and expected in opinions and filings; I just used a handful of both those I know to be common in the legal world and those that are common in the lay world. This selection will only be effective if the user has the selected font installed, however. Otherwise a fallback will be used.
Choose a screen width. This includes the navigation pane and settings column, but those can be hidden by clicking on the buttons on the lower left corner of the screen.
I have also included a brief definition of any legal Latin I have run across as title text, though I may have missed some. You may choose whether or not to display that as well.
I plan to be coming back here as often as I have the time to do so. And, as decisions are published, when they have numbers beyond the blanks they may receive when released, I will try to keep that information up to date.
While I will try to make this site accessible by all, please let me know how I can improve that accessibility. I am unsure how screen readers will interpret some of my markup.
I will add a more flexible way to customize your color scheme beyond light/dark mode, so if you actually want to have Larry Wall's background color burning your eyes (click if you dare).
I want this site to educate people, whether they are budding legal nerds like myself, law students, or just folks who want to know what all the fuss is about and (reasonably) are skeptical of the media.
I want to include relevant docket entries, so a user can jump to them with the same format.
I may include the majority opinion of the court, if I can prevent my blood from boiling while I put them together. If that happens, they may include more commentary than I have in the dissents.
I want to include issues that aren't cases yet, but may be in the future. This may include Circuit Court opinions or even State Court opinions.
I want to include a detailed accounting of this how our country became...the opposite of great. I'm starting with today, and I have no shortage of things to add.
I have a full time job. I have health issues that mean I may not have easy access to the tools that make the processing (adding the necessary markup) easy. I'm working on improving that, but so far throwing together the raw HTML seems to be the most effective way to accomplish my goal. If/when I can start using a template or hack together some code to help me out with this, I will, but as I stated, I've got other things going on in life. At some point I might accept help, but for now I'm leaving it at WYSIWYG. And because your favorite case to rail against isn't here, it isn't because I necessarily don't agree that it's a bad ruling, but I haven't had time to look at it and figure out what it is. Or I know, but it's a lot of work to get there.
I'm a concerned U.S. citizen, no longer "proud to be an American," with an unhealthy interest in law and politics—just enough to get me riled up, but not yet enough to push me into law school or political office. I'll leave that to the younger folks.
Personally, I am strongly in favor of LGBTQ+ rights (as it affects me and my friends directly), Medicare for all (as it affects me directly), and other generally "leftist" or "socialist" causes. I am a registered Democrat, but the party as a whole is far too conservative for my liking and I'd say I lean anarchist.