Whatever your politics or judicial philosophy, you have to admit that the new Chief Justice of the United States has made SCOTUS watching a lot more fun. He has a great sense of humor both on and off the bench, his opinions have always been regarded as crisp and increasingly his dissents are just plain fun to read. Some excerpts:
"We give ourselves far too much credit in claiming that our sharply divided, ebbing and flowing decisions in this area gave rise to 'clearly established' federal law. ... When the state courts considered these cases, our precedents did not provide them with 'clearly established' law, but instead a dog's breakfast of divided, conflicting, and ever-changing analyses."
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"Whatever the law may be today, the Court's ruling that 'twas always so - and that state courts were 'objectively unreasonable' not to know it - is utterly revisionist."
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"I do not understand how the author of today's opinion can say that Johnson had no effect on Penry I, when he joined a dissent in Johnson stating that the majority opinion 'upset our settled Eighth Amendment jurisprudence.' Now Johnson is dismissed as just an application of 'basic legal principle[s],' over which Justices can disagree; back then it 'upset our settled Eighth Amendment jurisprudence.'"
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"AEDPA requires state courts to reasonably apply clearly established federal law. It does not require them to have a crystal ball."
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"In today's decisions, the Court trivializes AEDPA's requirements and overturns decades-old sentences on the ground that they were contrary to clearly established federal law at the time - even though the same Justices who form the majority today were complaining at that time that this Court was changing that 'clearly established' law."
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And my personal favorite thus far (I am still chuckling over this one) from Abdul-Kabir v. Quarterman:
"[P]erhaps there is no reason to be unduly glum. After all, today the author of a dissent issued in 1988 writes two majority opinions concluding that the views expressed in that dissent actually represented 'clearly established' federal law at that time. So there is hope yet for the views expressed in this dissent, not simply down the road, but tunc pro nunc. Encouraged by the majority's determination that the future can change the past, I respectfully dissent.
Reading Robert's dissents is a trip down memory lane for me. The humorous yet "we are close friends who strongly disagree" tone is reminiscent of the Justice Rehnquist that Roberts clerked for rather than the Chief Justice Rehnquist who evolved later. Frankly, I like it a lot better than the "you must be an idiot if you disagree with me" tone so prevalent in Justice Scalia's dissents.
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