The Supreme Court is asked to review several thousand cases each year. It agrees to review fewer than 1% of them. It takes four votes of the nine to decide to review a case. (The grant of review is generally called a "grant of certiorari" or just a "cert. grant.")
Sometimes Justices write opinions dissenting from a denial of cert., arguing that the Court should have taken the case. And sometimes they write opinions respecting the denial of cert., explaining why it made sense to deny review in this case but noting that the Court ought to consider the question in future cases.
Such opinions are often solo opinions, and are sometimes signed by two or three Justices from the liberal or conservative wings of the Court. But it turns out that Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch have also jointly filed nine such opinions, eight just for themselves and one for themselves plus Justice Kagan. All of them, it seems to me, at least suggest that the Court ought to move the law in a somewhat more government-restrictive direction (loosely speaking); most of them specifically point to somewhat broader constitutional rights protections. Prompted by two such opinions earlier this month, I thought I'd note the cases and the issues they involved.
