unofan
Well-known member
Does the fact that Kennedy wrote this opinion offer any hints about any of the upcoming rulings? Would there be any expectation of who would issue the opinion in the gerrymandering case(s) if they were to come down on the side of basic democratic values?
The only time you can start guessing about who is writing a given opinion is once enough have been written that you can fill in the blanks on who has some left. As a general rule of thumb, they try to divide the majority opinions up equally by monthly sitting. So if, for instance, there's only one left from November and Alito hasn't written one yet, it's a good bet he's writing that one. It's not always accurate (because occasionally votes switch late or a concurrence will steal the majority away), but is as good a barometer as anything we have.
I haven't looked at the data lately to see if we can predict anything like that, yet.