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A majority opinion sets forth the decision of the court and an explanation of the rationale behind the court's decision. Not all cases have a majority opinion. At times, the justices voting for a majority decision (e.g., to affirm or reverse the lower court 's decision) may have drastically different reasons for their votes, and cannot agree on ...
A judicial opinion is a form of legal opinion written by a judge or a judicial panel in the course of resolving a legal dispute, providing the decision reached to resolve the dispute, and usually indicating the facts which led to the dispute and an analysis of the law used to arrive at the decision.
Once the draft opinion has been reviewed, the remaining justices may recommend changes to the opinion. Whether these changes are accommodated depends on the legal philosophy of the drafters as well as on how strong a majority the opinion garnered at conference. A justice may instead simply join the opinion at that point without comment.
Models of judicial decision making are developed by researchers and scholars to provide an explanation for the votes of United States Supreme Court Justices. With the Supreme Court holding such importance in the American legal and political system, researchers, scholars, and court-watchers have long tried to understand the motivations of its ...
The Supreme Court of Florida frequently releases death penalty opinions in a per curiam form, even if there are concurring and dissenting opinions to the majority. [ 9 ] Many decisions of the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division , especially in the First and Second Judicial Departments, do not designate an author.
A plurality decision is a court decision in which no opinion received the support of a majority of the judges. A plurality opinion is the judicial opinion or opinions which received the most support among those opinions which supported the plurality decision. The plurality opinion did not receive the support of more than half the justices, but ...
Multiple concurrences and dissents within a case are numbered, with joining votes numbered accordingly. Justices frequently join multiple opinions in a single case; each vote is subdivided accordingly. An asterisk ( * ) in the Court's opinion denotes that it was only a majority in part or a plurality.
But concurring opinions can sometimes be cited as a form of persuasive precedent (assuming the point of law is one on which there is no binding precedent already in effect). The conflict in views between a majority opinion and a concurring opinion can assist a lawyer in understanding the points of law articulated in the majority opinion.