Legal Research

A Study of U.S. Supreme Court Oral Dissents

By Simon Fodden

Available as of today on SSRN, “Dissents from the Bench: A Compilation of Oral Dissents Issued by U.S. Supreme Court Justices“, by Jill Duffy and Elizabeth Lambert, identifies 117 instances where justices of the the United States Supreme Court issued oral dissenting judgments. Duffy is a research librarian at the Court and Lambert is a staff attorney at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The authors examined all decisions from 1969 to the present day. Curiously perhaps, oral dissents are not officially recorded as a matter of course, and some were only discovered to have occurred because of incidental statements in contemporary news reports. Many of the oral dissents can be heard on the relevant opinion announcement preserved and made available publicly on the Oyez Project. Where such aural text exists, a footnote identifies the point in the recording at which the dissent begins.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 15, 2009 (boomark / email).