In article <050320051607186440%dbarnes@aol.com>,
David W. Barnes <dbarnes@aol.com> wrote:

In article <d0df1l$2tau$1@agate.berkeley.edu>, Arturo Magidin
<magidin@math.berkeley.edu> wrote:

In article <040320052231020755%dbarnes@aol.com>,
David W. Barnes <dbarnes@aol.com> wrote:

In article <1109952853.482115.65170@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
<magidin@math.berkeley.edu> wrote:

David W. Barnes wrote:

In article <1109774993.789958.201120@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
<magidin@math.berkeley.edu> wrote:

[.snip.]

Yes. Sorry, it's just that "dissenting opinions" refers to written
opinions dissenting from the judgement of the court.

Not necessarily. It can be a written opinion or simply the opinion.

Huh?

In the context of the Supreme Court, "opinion" is a term of art and
refers to the written explanation for the decision. "The opinion for
the Court", "concurring opinion", "dissenting opinion", "opinion
concurring in part and dissenting in part".

Right - so?

Look. I was trying to clarify the statement about "four dissents." You
seem to be on a crusade to defend each and every word you wrote,
whether it was accurate, possibly accurate, somewhat accurate, or
not.

No - you seem to be on a crusade to parse out individual phrases and
words and have them mean something different than they did when I wrote
them.

There were not "four dissents" in this case: there were two dissents,
with four dissentERS.

Of course there were four dissents.

No, there weren't. There were four dissenters, and two
dissents. That's exactly the point. You are using the word improperly;
it is simple enough to fix. That's all.

I could ask the same thing of you. You said "four dissents." I
corrected and clarified and pointed out that in fact there were only
two dissents. At which point you started arguing that what you had
said was correct because you can talk about opinions whether written
or not. It seems to me that you are not familiar with the language
used to describe these situations, made a slight an unimportant
imprecision, and then proceeded to defend it to the death when it was
clarified.

I think our difference here is you view "four dissents" as four
dissenting opinions - I view it as four persons dissenting.

You are welcome to use language any way you want, but be aware that
this is not what the words are normally taken to mean in this
context. That's all.

You can understand "four dissents" to mean "four
dissenters", but nobody who knows about the Supreme Court or the US
legal system is going to understand that you mean "four dissenters":
they are going to take "four dissents" to mean four ->written<-
dissents. This is not simply "my view"; it's the way the words are
universally used in this context. Likewise, "opinion", while in
colloquial terms means one thing, in the context of the Supreme Court
(and in general, of the judgement of courts that work under a common
law system as they do in the US) the word refers exclusively to the
written exposition by the judge or judges of both the result and the
legal reasoning behind the decision.

"Dissent" is a term of art here; you can use it any way you want, but
people are not going to take from your words your meaning: they are
going to misinterpret you because you are using terms of art
incorrectly. That's all. It would have been simple enough to take the
precision and use the terminology properly.