Law.com carries this commentary by Howard Basham. He writes:
I’ve recently begun reading 7th Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner’s newest book, “How Judges Think.” It’s too soon to tell how many installments of my “On Appeal” column the book will spawn, but the topic of this week’s column arises from the book’s introduction, in which Posner writes that “A judge might join the majority opinion in a case not because he agreed with it but because he thought that dissenting publicly would magnify the effect of the majority opinion by drawing attention to it.”
It had not previously occurred to me that a judge on an intermediate federal appellate court might join in an opinion to minimize the opinion’s impact . . .
