Friday, March 30, 2012

By now, the Supreme Court...

...may have already voted on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. On Intrade the chance of the Court overturning the individual mandate is currently 58%. 

According to an article in the Washington Post (my emphasis): 

If the usual process occurs, the justices of the Supreme Court will gather around a large rectangular table Friday morning and, one by one, cast their votes on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care law.

They will let the rest of us know the outcome in due time.
It can take years for a controversy to reach the court and months for the justices to write the opinions that lay out the legal frameworks for their decisions. But they move with surprising speed to vote on cases they have heard, almost always within days of oral arguments. Then — silence.
In a town where secrets are hard to keep, the Supreme Court is a striking outlier. The justices and their clerks know the outcome of cases almost immediately, but it’s rare for rulings to become known before the justices announce them.
“It’s only a small number of people who know, and they just don’t leak,” said Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and a former clerk to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. “I mean, you’re sworn to secrecy.”
Fair enough. But are those clerks (and judges) sworn not to "gamble?"

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