Laws are subject to interpretations, courts are official interpreters, and the Supreme Court has the last word. That is a fact of life, though it is also a fact of life that you sometimes wonder if there is anything "supreme" about the Supreme Court. Yes, you know that individual justices come with individual agenda and attitudes. But sometimes they startle us in language and logic or in simple assertion even.
That's how I felt, once again, about what Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times has called "the two leading cases of the past term" (October 2007 to July 2008) in her farewell piece, "2,691 Decisions" (July 13). Greenhouse was the first reporter the Times employed three decades ago specifically to cover the Supreme Court. I agreed with one decision and disagreed with the other, but both had improbable words and thoughts.
The decision I agreed with was Boumediene et al. v. Bush. It said, in a slim majority of 5-4, that even those held as "enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to have the reasons for their imprisonment explained.