I tried to read the detainee case decisions, but really the only one I could understand was Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi. That made a lot of sense to me. What I found most unsettling about the government’s position in these cases is that everything seemed mighty ad hoc like they didn’t have real reasons for treating Prisoner X like so and Prisoner Y like so. No real rules governed anything, and everyone was being shipped about in an arbitrary manner. The rulings don’t really seem to have altered that very much, since they were scattered, there was often no majority, and in a lot of instances the Court chose to duck the big issues. Now we’ve got more confusion than ever.
It’s nice to see, though, that they rejected the government’s far-too-cute position on the legal status of the Guantanamo Bay facility.