ALBANY – With a swipe at scholars who focus only on divided opinions in attempting to pigeonhole judicial ideology, Court of Appeals Judge Richard C. Wesley yesterday told an audience at Albany Law School that the common academic model of appellate analysis is essentially useless and factually baseless.
“Some insist on evaluating the Court’s work by focusing only on cases in which there is a dissent,” Judge Wesley said. “This approach, in my opinion, suffers from a serious diagnostic flaw. It presupposes that unanimous opinions have some monolithic quality to them- that the Court was of one mind throughout the deliberative process without the judges ever seriously questioning the legal reasoning at the core of the decision.”
