SCOTUS opinion with multiple authors In most cases, a supreme court opinion has one justice listed author, though one or more other justices may join. However, in the recent case Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, the single dissenting opinion is attributed to three justices. How common is it for a supreme court opinion to have multiple listed authors, and what reasons might there be for this?
Usually a Supreme Court opnion has a single author, although often multiple Justices &quot;sign&quot; or &quot;join&quot; the opinion, meaning that those Justices agree with both the reasoning and the result. It is very common for ma Justice who is not the author to suggest specific wording for an opnion, anywhere from a single word to several paragrahs or even pages of writing. Such suggestions are not usually formally credited. However, in some cases an opinion is drafted by a committee of justices, with each taking one or more sections of the opinion. This may be done to speed up the drafting, or to make sure that the opinion will be acceptable to a wider ranger of the Justices, or for other reasons. The book The Brethren by Woodward and Armstrong describes several occasions when the Burger court used committee opinions, usually drafted by three Justices.
You can use academic sources when arguing in court if you like, but be aware of the following: Academic texts are not primary sources of law in Jamaica. What is in them may be persuasive but does not bind a court in the same way as statute law or case law. Sometimes, it's appropriate to cite works of legal scholarship to flesh out an argument. If the book contains a succinctly-phrased statement that matches what you want to prove, but prior case law isn't quite as neatly applicable, then you might cite both - subject to points below. Citing the book alone is weaker. At other times, when there is authority on both sides of a point, you might find academic argument tipping the balance, but again not to be used in isolation. Whether a text is persuasive may not be obvious, especially for older works. Sometimes, perhaps often, the law has changed since the book was published. Don't assume that an old book by a famous author will automatically be revered. You can check to see if newer books say something different from the older one, and in general start your search looking backwards from now in order to identify the current state of the law. It is more common these days to see references to current editions of textbooks than comparatively ancient authorities, no matter how illustrious the name of Blackstone might be. If a point of law is not actually contested, then there is no need to argue about it. It can form part of the background material that is agreed on between the parties. Basic principles of the way contracts work don't need elaboration or authority. Judges would prefer to have you limit the number and range of authorities you bring in, because they only have so much time in their day and they don't want to struggle through a lot of unnecessary background reading. In a skeleton argument, the strong preference is for only one principal authority to be mentioned in support of each point of law. You can mention a recent decisive case rather than reciting the entire history of case-law on the topic, and you don't need to include cases where a well-understood precedent was applied without difficulty. It may be that a textbook brings you to the relevant statute or judgement but then that is what you need to cite, not the textbook itself, especially if it simply quotes or restates what is found in the primary material. For filing court documents in general, pay close attention to the Civil Procedure Rules and the Practice Directions, including PD No. 8 of 2020 on the format of the judge's bundle. If the judge is annoyed enough about non-compliance with the court's rules about submissions, then various sanctions are available to them. For example, they can refuse costs on the legal research that led to the preparation of the submission. In correspondence, which I think you allude to, you can be more free than when dealing with the judge's bundle. In a letter to the opposing party you can certainly bring in additional references that you think would be helpful to you as a matter of rhetoric and argumentation. Do note that doesn't mean it is a good idea to make correspondence too aggressive or lengthy. For one thing, a judge can end up reviewing the correspondence and will notice whether or not you are making a good-faith effort to resolve the matter, or at least identify the salient issues to bring to the court.
Courts only decide disputes If the written contract says X but the parties agree they meant Y, then the court adopts Y. However, if the written contract says X but one party asserts Y and the other Z, the court takes the written contract as definitive. The parol evidence rule would prevent any evidence being introduced if X is unambiguous. Plaintiff presents contemporaneous evidence that the parties did not intend the Written Agreement to be integrated, even though the template they used contains the integration clause. The plaintiff can’t introduce that evidence in the first place unless there is some ambiguity to be resolved. If it’s plain on the face that integration (whatever that is) was intended then we’re done here counsel, move along. But what if at the same time that they signed the Written Agreement in question the parties signed another agreement covering some of the same subjects? If the documents don’t create a practical conflict then we’re in the same place as before. If they do then the court will try to resolve that within the written documents - a later document will usually prevail over an earlier one and a more detailed document over a more general one. Extrinsic evidence is almost always excluded. Or what if there is incontrovertible evidence that both parties subsequently and intentionally acted contrary to some term of the Written Agreement? That would suggest that the Written Agreement did not represent the Actual Agreement. No, that would constitute a waiver by one or both parties - you can choose not to enforce (waive) your rights under a contract. This can be one off or, if repeated often enough, a waiver for all future breaches. Alternatively, the parties are free to change the terms of their contract; maybe that’s what happened.
If there is judgement and creativity used in the selection of the list, that selection is protectable by copyright under US law, and under the laws of many other countries. The standards vary, but in most cases the degree of creativity required is low. In the US the &quot;time and effort&quot; put into the list is not relevant, it is the degree of originality and creativity that matters. This is not true in all countries. If the list includes comments on individual list items written by the list creator, those comments would normally be protected by copyright, even when the list as a whole is not. If the list is ordered in some creative way, the ordering would also be protected, such as dividing the list into categories. an &quot;obvious&quot; ordering such as alphabetical is not subject to copyright protection. However, that these various web sites exist at particular addresses is a fact (or a set of facts) and facts are never protected by copyright. If someone produces a different list, that includes many but not all of the same sites, and some other sites, it is probably not infringement even if your list was used as one source for the newer list. If your list makes a serious attempt to include every nature website, and no selection is done, there is actually less creativity in the selection than if some judgement is used on what to include and what to omit. In that case, another list that also includes every nature website may not be considered an infringement. See Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) in which one company copied a telephone book published by another company. Because there was no selection (everyone in the designated area was included) and the order was obvious (alphabetical), the US Supreme Court rules that there was no originality, and there fore no copyright protection in the book, and copying it was not copyright infringement. Feist is now a key case on copyright law in the US, and is followed in some other countries.
A properly cited case will include a reference to a case reporter, online database, or neutral citation. To confirm that the case exists, you would have to track down the purported reporter/journal/database and query whether the case exists at that location. There is a meta post that presents online legal research tools. Many universities and courts have public law libraries that have access to printed reporters and/or online databases.
In brief: In common law systems, are there specific laws? Yes. Are they written down? Yes, here are the laws of Australia and New Zealand. Or are there only previous court rulings? No. Elaboration: Broadly (and rather vaguely) speaking there are 3 sources of law in a common law jurisdiction: Statute law which consists of the Acts passed by the legislature Administrative law which consists of the rules and regulations made by the administrative arm of government under the powers granted them by the constitution or delegated by the legislature Case law which consists of the decisions made by the courts; this can be decisions based on Long-standing precedents whose origins are lost in the mists of time Interpretations of statute and administrative law It is important to remember that the courts only get involved to resolve conflicts (civil or criminal) - they do not unilaterally make decisions on the law. Judges (if they are wise) never give opinions on the law - that is the role of solicitors and barristers who are the paid advocates of the parties. The role of a judge is to decide how the law fits the circumstances of the particular case before them. To do this they interpret the statutes, administrative rules and decisions made by other judges on similar cases. The decision of a superior court is binding on a subordinate court, persuasive on an equivalent court or a court in a parallel jurisdiction and subject to review by a superior court. The overwhelming majority of cases do not make new case law - most of the arguments in court are about why (or why not) the established law applies to the current facts; they are not about what the law is. Occasionally a decision will be made that modifies the previous interpretation or even more rarely represents a paradigm shift - those are the cases that matter!
The US Supreme Court has made some decisions that legal scholars, other judges, lawyers, and people in general have strongly criticized as mistaken, but none anywhere nearly as wild as the one suggested in the question. Many such, well let me call them &quot;disputed&quot;, rulings have been later overturned by the court itself. A well known example is Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940), which was overruled a few years later by West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). Many of the so-called Lochner era economic decisions were also eventually overturned by the Court itself. Some disputed holdings have been altered by changes in the law, State or Federal. Some have been overturned via a constitutional amendment, such as Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 243 (1833), which is now held to have been overruled by the Fourteenth Amendment, although the Court did not come to that conclusion until early in the 20th century. Perhaps the most notorious case is Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857) which held that a person of African descent could never become a US citizen, and that Congress was without power to prohibit slavery in any US state or territory. This is perhaps the most denounced decision of the US Supreme Court in its history (See the linked Wikipedia article for a few such comments.) This decision was undone de facto by the outcome of the US Civil War, and de jure by the adoption of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Some cases have later been treated as &quot;bad law&quot; even though not formally overturned. An example is Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), in which the Supreme Court upheld the removal of US citizens of Japanese ancestry from the US Pacific coast during WWII, and their confinement in what has been described as a series of concentration camps. This has not been formally overruled, but in Trump v. Hawaii No. 17-965, 585 U.S. ___ (2018), Chief Justice Roberts wrote: The dissent's reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—'has no place in law under the Constitution.' 323 U. S., at 248 (Jackson, J., dissenting). [quoting Jackson's dissent in Korematsu] And some cases, although much disputed, still stand as good law. The case of Flood v. Kuhn, 407 U.S. 258 (1972), holding that Baseball continued to be exempt from anti-trust laws, federal and state, has been much criticized, but remains in force to this day. (See the section &quot;Subsequent jurisprudence&quot; in the linked Wikipedia article) Congress has not, so far, acted to limit the exemption, as the opinion indicates that it had the power to do. In short, a US Supreme Court decision, however &quot;erroneous&quot; or &quot;absurd&quot; commentators or the public may consider it, remains the law of the land until it is overturned or distinguished by the court, or made obsolete by changes in statute or in the Constitution itself. It the highly unlikely situation described in the question, John Doe would remain in prison until his sentence expired or he received a pardon.
No The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. Any courts the Congress creates are, by definition, inferior. Of course, Congress can overrule a SCOTUS decision by passing a law to that effect,unless the decision defines a right under the Constitution. So they couldn’t overturn Roe but they could overturn Dobbs. It’s largely the gutlessness of Congress in grappling with controversial issues that has put SCOTUS in the position of lawmaker.