« New York City cooking crime books? | Main | Uodate on Parker case »

Alito's dissents

[via the Volokh Conspiracy] Ann Althouse has a commentary on a NY Times article on Alito's dissents. Another blogger, Cass Sunstein, argues that Alito's dissents are generally to the "right" of the rest of the panel (nevermind that in the legal world left and right are not terribly clear at times -- i.e., the medical marihuana case -- and even in the case of the First Amendment, campaign finance reform has much of the left enthralled and much of the right appalled).

Althouse points out that the article repeats Sunstein's conclusions, but also mentions that Alito dissented in four cases that the Supreme Court later took, and in three of the four ruled the same way as his dissent called for. Prof. Frank Cross of the Univ. of Texas, who runs a database on how the Supreme Court treats Circuit decisions, say those are the highest numbers in his database (not clear if that's the highest number of "dissents adopted out of cases taken" or the highest percentage of the same).