Seeking SCOTUS speculations during the Justices holiday break

Last year around this time, wehad the Supreme Court’s then-fresh opinion in Gall and Kimbrough to keep us warm through long winter nights.  This year, though we have lots of new USSC data to unpack, the Justices failed to beat the holiday rush in resolving any of its sentencing sleeper cases from the Fall. 

Intriguingly, the Court managed to issue only two signed opinions before taking its holiday break this year.  As detailed here, the Justices did get out four per curiam opinion and the two cases with signed opinions involved a divided court.  But with only Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Stevens having authored signed opinions for the Court, it is difficult to even effectively speculate who might be writing the opinions in Oregon v. Ice, which deals with Blakely‘s applicability to consecutive sentencing determinations, and United States v. Hayes, which deal with the reach of the federal prohibition on certain misdemeanants possessing firearms and implicates Second Amendment issues.

Because Justice Scalia’s opinions are always good for blogging business and because he was his usual active questioner in the oral arguments in Ice and Hayes, I am hoping he is spending the holiday break adding a final few constitutional flourishes to opinions for the Court in these cases.  Though I know Santa won’t have the opinions in hand when making deliveries next week, I do think we could get both opinions in early January.  And, as of this writing, I think they may be worth the wait for sentencing fans.

Given that public SCOTUS activity is on ice until January 12, I would be grateful for readers keep me warm with speculations about Ice or about any other High Court cases they are following this Term.