Tom Goldstein has a thoughtful and interesting post on SCOTUSBlog summarizing the just-sortof-concluded Supreme Court term and looking forward to the next. I think Goldstein overstates the conservative trajectory of the Court; the judiciary’s inertial momentum to the left remains strong, and the Roberts Court, as a whole, is less conservative than many claim. That disagreement aside, I think Goldstein makes some very good points, and his analysis is informative.
I was particularly struck by his discussion of Scalia and Thomas, which I excerpt below:
I think that the most interesting Justices, by far, were Justices Scalia and Thomas. Both remain the most principled members of the Court. They joined the defendant-favoring majorities in Gant in Melendez-Diaz, as they consistently have done in the recent lines of jury-right and confrontation cases. Justice Scalia joined the left to provide a majority in Cuomo and Spears. Justice Thomas did the same in the maritime punitive damages case, Atlantic Sounding. There is no counter-example in which a member of the left joined the Court