In United States v. Skrmetti the Supreme Court issued an opinion the 18th of June 2025.
On the 21st of July 2025 it issued a judgment.
What is the purpose of issuing a judgment?
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
In most cases, if you read all the way through the (long) Opinions you will know what the court has decided but the parties, and court staff, need to know what, in practical terms, they need to do, so they need another (short) document which tells them.
Lawyers are interested in the Opinions because (in the case of higher courts) they may be authoritative precedents which can be cited in future cases and/or also to see if there is some point they can appeal on (not in this case in the Supreme Court but in lower courts).
But court officials and the parties need to know the result in clear simple terms - e.g. "you must pay Mr Smith £50,000" or in this case "appeal dismissed - decision of lower court stands" without having to work it out by reading the Opinions.
-
The other reason for the delay is to allow courts to discover inadvertent errors in an opinion and correct those errors in the few days before a judgment enters, for example, if the opinion's concluding holding sentence gets the results contrary to everything the opinion was leading up to and a party or member of the public brings that to the court's attention (something that can happen, for example, by accidentally omitting the word "not" from a sentence, or putting the wrong number of zeros in the amount awarded).ohwilleke– ohwilleke2026-01-01 07:02:42 +00:00Commented 1 hour ago
An opinion is issued by one or more justices to explain how they feel the law applies to a given case, and to cases like it. Majority opinions are taken into account by other courts when judging cases which raise similar legal questions.
A judgment is a formal order for a particular thing to happen in a particular case. A Supreme Court judgment is generally either “such-and-such a court was wrong and needs to do the trial over again” or “everything looks good here and nothing needs to happen”. It has no relevance to other cases.
