The Supreme Court handed down five more opinions today. SCOTUSBlog has the details. Only one of the five, Kentucky Retirement Systems v. EEOC, was 5-4, and it produced an interesting line-up. Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Stevens, Souter and Thomas. Justice Kennedy filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, and Alito. Also worth noting is that the Court’s preemption holding in Chamber of Commerce v. Brown was written by Justice Stevens for a seven justice majority. Only Justices Breyer and Ginsburg dissented.
With today’s decisions, the percentage of cases decided by a 5-4 margin this term is below 15 percent. With only ten more cases to go, it seems this term’s level of unanimity, and relative lack of ideological division, may resemble OT2005 more than OT2006. Of course, some big cases remain in the queue, so we’ll have to wait until next week to know for sure.