Professor Justin Driver’s recent article “The Insignificance of Judicial Opinions,” published in the California Law Review, challenges academia’s received wisdom regarding the centrality of judicial opinions and argues that bottom-line judicial decisions loom much larger than is commonly understood. But Driver says that for both the public and the legal community, “judicial rationales matter far, far less than is commonly asserted.”“[T]his Essay contends not that judicial opinions are irrelevant, only that they are comparatively insignificant,” Driver writes. Why does the legal community focus so much on judicial opinions themselves? Judicial opinions that can be viewed as shoddily reasoned, that is, are nevertheless venerated in constitutional classrooms. That is true for lots of reasons, not least because lawyers dispute the meaning of judicial opinions all day, every day.

Source: New York Times March 26, 2026 18:24 UTC