I don't see how any sort of "order," as opposed to an opinion accompanied by a judgment, can have any sort of binding effect on anyone other than the parties. Orders aren't judgments and so at most are the law of the case, affecting only the parties. Orders aren't even published in the US Reports, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe I wasn't paying attention in law school (or I was but misunderstood what I heard), but this sure isn't the system I learned back in the early 1980s, nor is it the system I practiced under for nearly half a century.
Fair enough. But I still don't see why a mere interim order would have any sort of binding effect on anyone other than the parties. In fact, an interim order with no explicit reasoning, just what you can glean implicitly, wouldn't even be persuasive.
I wonder if the Court could formalize the well-considered/non-well-considered judgment distinction discussed in Option 4 by designating some interim orders as “published” and others as “unpublished.” This seems to work well enough in the lower courts, which face a similar issue of needing to decide more cases more quickly than would be practicable for each to produce a binding precedent.
This is all very thoughtful and everything, but given how this Supreme Soviet has treated precedent, it’s a tad precious.
I don't see how any sort of "order," as opposed to an opinion accompanied by a judgment, can have any sort of binding effect on anyone other than the parties. Orders aren't judgments and so at most are the law of the case, affecting only the parties. Orders aren't even published in the US Reports, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe I wasn't paying attention in law school (or I was but misunderstood what I heard), but this sure isn't the system I learned back in the early 1980s, nor is it the system I practiced under for nearly half a century.
A lot of these decisions do have preliminary U.S. Reports citations on them, and you'll eventually find them in the U.S. Reports. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a269_bp7c.pdf
That's been true for decades. E.g. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/boundvolumes/503bv.pdf#page=815
Fair enough. But I still don't see why a mere interim order would have any sort of binding effect on anyone other than the parties. In fact, an interim order with no explicit reasoning, just what you can glean implicitly, wouldn't even be persuasive.
I wonder if the Court could formalize the well-considered/non-well-considered judgment distinction discussed in Option 4 by designating some interim orders as “published” and others as “unpublished.” This seems to work well enough in the lower courts, which face a similar issue of needing to decide more cases more quickly than would be practicable for each to produce a binding precedent.