The SCOTUS decision on jury unanimity was about a lot of other stuff too. In this companion piece to my Verdict column,I try to decode the allusions to race, illicit legislative motive, church-state separation, and abortion.

Why wasn't the SCOTUS decision on jury unanimity itself unanimous? Because 3 Justices worried about retroactive application to cases with not-yet-final appeals. I argue here that prospective-only advisory opinions--available in some state courts and constitutional courts of many other countries--would solve that problem.

Prof Buchanan explains that deficit scolds gonna scold, even when their ordinarily bad ideas are affirmatively dangerous.

Yesterday on the blog Prof Segall argued it would be better for abortion rights if the SCOTUS overrules Roe etc sooner rather than later. Today I give 4 reasons to doubt his analysis: 1) He's not actually "pro-choice" in a constitutional sense, so he's not arguing against his priors; 2) He lacks a basis for the assumption that losing Roe as a SCOTUS issue will mean that social conservatives no longer vote R in large numbers, given race, immigration, guns, gay rights, "war on Christmas," and even abortion itself as a sub-constitutional issue; 3) He understates the value of even a very watered-down constitutional right to abortion; & 4) He misreads John Roberts.

Prof Segall argues that if the SCOTUS is going to overrule abortion rights anyway, it's better for those who favor such rights that the Court do so before rather than after the 2020 election.