Unused and Probably Unusable

Was there a particular case — a Seminal Opinion — that strongly influenced your attitude toward the legal system or the legal profession, or that helped you decide the role you wanted to play within the profession? Did one majority or dissenting opinion plant seeds from which your lawyer psyche grew? If so, what was it and what difference has it made in your professional goals or practice?

Seminal? Twig-bending? (as the twig is bent, so grows the branch)

I hated Wickard, but there were so _many_ I hated. Scalia's ED v Smith, as noted, the "peyote" case, got it wrong where it counted. O'Connor in the gravesite case, Lyng v. Northwest Indian CPA, same criticism: my God that was badly decided.

The Reynolds case which is still binding law as to marriage is interesting, too; the Supreme Court in 1878 laid down what remains the Law of the Land on marriage as one's conscience and religion dictates, by addressing much the same question as ED v. Smith, which is why that case is only half wrong (right on the precedent, awful on the reasoning and decision to apply that precedent): "whether religious belief can be accepted as a justification of an overt act made criminal by the law of the land." See 98 U.S. 145.

The one where the jurors are partying, Tanner v. U.S., 483 US 107 (1987), but because it's not an "extrinsic influence" (wrong, doubly wrong) there's no way to bring in the "not relevant" evidence of the massive, inconceivably awful due process violation presented by drugged, high, felony-drug-weight-selling jurors. This is my least favorite rule ever, Rule 606(b); Mike, I promised I'd cover some of that kind of thing. "Substantial policy considerations" my ASS. That decision makes me very angry, to this day.

One of the worst decisions ever: Johnson and Graham's Lessee v. M'Intosh, one of the famed Marshall trilogy which demolished Indian rights in their own land, by judicial approval of legislative and executive and private theft. In M'Intosh, aka McIntosh, reported at 8 Wheat. 543, the Court decided that since Indians cannot hold absolute rights in land (!) that when the government allowed them to have any rights in the property they lived on, it was a life tenancy only; when they attempted to sell their land for money to another white man, but the government had sold the same land later to a different white man, title derived from the Native American grant was no good. Amazing outcome, uplifting language, despicable language. It burns me, even at this great distance of 182 years.