Appellate courts are deliberately cagey. When they make a decision, they normally limit their decisions to the facts in a case. When other issues arise not related to the case under consideration, they will write sentences like, “We reserve deciding that issue,” or “We do not need to decide this issue to resolve this case,” or other such verbiage. When a decision’s scope is not clear, appellate courts are reluctant to express limits to the impact of a decision, willing…

When I was a kid, I remember watching an interview with the then-current crop of Nobel Prize winners on television. The concept was that these men and women were the world’s brightest people and their insights on things outside of their professional expertises would be valuable. The Physics prize winner kept saying all kinds of non-mainstream things that made him seem odd compared the others whose views were within the norm, at least to my then-child’s mind.  One thing he…