How the Press Covers Supreme Court Decisions, and What the Stories Leave Out

Here is how a Supreme Court decision becomes news. Nine people spend months writing a hundred pages of careful reasoning. At ten o'clock on a decision day the Court releases it. By ten-fifteen a reporter, who has been handed a document the length of a novella and a deadline the length of a sandwich break, has produced a headline. By ten-thirty that headline is on your phone. By dinner it is what your brother-in-law believes the Court said.

I want to talk about the gap between those two documents, the opinion and the headline. Folks, it is not a small gap. It is the Grand Canyon, and a whole industry of commentary has been built on the cliff edge. The good news is that you can close it yourself in about ten minutes, with no law degree, and by the end of this post you will know how.

I am not claiming reporters are villains. Most are working hard under impossible time pressure. I am claiming something narrower and, I think, more useful: coverage of the Court is organized around who won, because that is a story, and a story about what the opinion held is a lecture. When those two things come apart, you will almost always hear the first and rarely the second.

The thesis in three numbered points

1. An opinion decides a question, not a winner. The Court answers the legal question in front of it, often narrower than the headline suggests, and the answer binds because of its reasoning.
2. Coverage tends to rename the question as the largest version of itself. A ruling about one statute becomes a ruling about a whole field of life, and a ruling about a procedure becomes a ruling about a right.
3. The remedy is cheap: read the holding. The Court tells you what it held, in words, in a place you can find in a minute.

Let me prove it with three famous examples. I will describe how each was commonly framed and then compare the frame with what the opinion actually said. I am not quoting any particular outlet, because I would rather you check the frames than take my word for them. The Court's own opinions are public, and the holdings are short.

Case study one: Dobbs and the "nationwide ban"

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, decided June 24, 2022, the Court considered a Mississippi law limiting most abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy. A common framing of the result was that the Court had banned abortion across the country, or that it had "ended abortion rights" in one stroke.

Now read the opinion. The Court held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and held that abortion regulations, like other health and welfare laws, are reviewed under the deferential rational-basis standard. The Court wrote: "It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives."

Notice what is missing from that sentence. The Court did not prohibit anything. It did not decide that abortion must be illegal, and it did not decide that it must be legal. It decided that the Constitution leaves the question to the voters and their legislatures, state by state, which is where the Constitution leaves most questions. After the decision, laws varied widely across the states, which is the ordinary result of leaving a matter to democratic choice.

You may think Dobbs was right or wrong. That is a worthwhile argument, and I think it was right, for reasons explained in Dobbs v. Jackson Read Closely, From Alito's History to the Joint Dissent. But it is a different argument from the one in the headline. "The Court banned abortion" is a claim about the holding. The holding says the Court banned nothing. A reader who believes the first claim has been told something false about what the Court did, and he cannot even argue with it, because the thing he is arguing with does not exist.

Case study two: Shelby County and "gutting" the Voting Rights Act

In Shelby County v. Holder, decided June 25, 2013, by a vote of five to four, the Court considered a pair of provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 required certain jurisdictions to get federal approval, called preclearance, before changing their voting rules. Section 4(b) contained the coverage formula that decided which jurisdictions had to do so, a formula based on turnout and test data from the 1960s and early 1970s.

A common framing was that the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, or struck down its protections against discrimination. The holding is narrower. The Court held that the coverage formula in Section 4(b) is unconstitutional, because it rested on decades-old data and so could not justify continuing to treat some states differently from others. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Act "imposes current burdens and must be justified by current needs." The Court did not strike down Section 5 itself, and it did not touch Section 2, the nationwide prohibition on voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, which remains the law and which plaintiffs continue to use.

The Court also said Congress was free to draft a new formula based on current conditions. You can disagree with the reasoning. Four Justices did, in a dissent. But the opinion's own text says what it decided, and "gutted" is a word about the effect, not the holding. For the full account see Shelby County v. Holder Asked Whether Old Data Could Still Govern the States, and read it next to what you remember of the coverage.

Case study three: Citizens United and "ending limits"

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, decided January 21, 2010, by a five-to-four vote, began with a nonprofit corporation that wanted to distribute a film critical of a presidential candidate. A federal statute made it a crime for corporations and unions to use their general treasury funds to pay for broadcasts like that near an election.

A common frame was that the Court had ended limits on money in politics or declared that corporations are persons with unlimited rights. Read the holding. The Court held that the government may not ban independent political spending by corporations and unions, because the First Amendment protects political speech and does not exempt speakers based on corporate form. It did not hold that direct contributions to candidates may not be limited; contribution limits remain in force, and corporations still cannot give money directly to candidates in federal elections. It also upheld, by a vote of eight to one, the law's disclosure requirements for independent spending. Five Myths About Citizens United That Still Show Up in Stump Speeches goes through the rest.

Again, you may think the decision was wrong. That is a respectable position, and many sincere people hold it. But a reader who thinks the Court abolished contribution limits is arguing about a case that was not decided. And a reader who has not heard about the eight-to-one disclosure holding cannot judge whether the decision's critics or its defenders are describing it fairly.

Why the gap keeps appearing

I do not think the cause is a conspiracy. It is a set of ordinary incentives, and they are easy to list.

• The clock. The Court issues long opinions on a fixed morning, often several at once. A reporter must file within minutes. Nobody can read two hundred pages and write a thoughtful summary in that time, and the result is a summary of the summary.
• The story needs a winner. Politics is a contest, and a headline needs a side. "The Court held that the coverage formula was out of date" does not sound like a story. "The Court gutted the Voting Rights Act" does.
• The vocabulary of effect. Reporters often describe what a decision will mean in practice. That is useful when it is labelled as prediction. It is misleading when it is written as if it were the holding.
• The audience. Readers want to know what the ruling means for their side. A story that tells them so travels faster than a story that says the Court answered a narrow question about a statute.

And then there is one more incentive, which is simple to state and hard to admit: a frame that makes the Court's decision sound extreme makes the Court's critics sound reasonable. If the Court "banned abortion" or "gutted voting rights," then anyone who opposes the Court is defending something obviously good. That is not an accident of syntax. It is the reason the frame survives correction.

The steelman: the press has a hard job

Let me state the other side as fairly as I can. A working Supreme Court reporter would say: you are asking for the impossible. The opinions are long, written by lawyers for lawyers, and a reporter's readers do not want a seminar. A headline has to compress. If the Court's ruling in practice makes a statute's central provision unenforceable, then saying the ruling "gutted" the statute is fair shorthand, not a lie. And reporters at the best outlets do tell readers the nuance in paragraph seven.

That is a fair defense, and I accept much of it. The best Court reporters in the country are careful, and they are working with a real constraint. But notice what the defense concedes: the nuance is in paragraph seven, and most readers stop at paragraph two. If the shorthand is going to be the thing the public carries away, then the shorthand has a duty to be right. A word like "gutted" or "banned" asserts a legal conclusion, and the person using it has accepted the burden of showing the opinion says it. In the three cases above, it did not.

Reading the syllabus in ten minutes

Here is the practical part, and it is the heart of the post. You can check any Court headline yourself in about ten minutes by following these steps in order.

1. Open the opinion on the Court's website. Opinions are posted there the day they are released. Skip the news article.
2. Read the syllabus. The first page or two of every opinion is a summary written by the Court's staff, called the syllabus. It states the facts, the question, the holding and how the Justices lined up. It is the part prepared for the reader in a hurry. Remember, though, that the Court said in 1906, in United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., that the syllabus is not part of the opinion and is not the law. It is a guide.
3. Find the word "held." The syllabus will say something like "Held:" followed by the holding. That sentence, or paragraph, is what the Court decided. Read it twice.
4. Check the vote. The syllabus lists who wrote the opinion, who joined, who concurred and who dissented. A five-to-four decision with a narrow concurrence from the fifth vote is a different thing from a nine-to-nothing ruling.
5. Look for what the Court did not decide. Good opinions often say so, with phrases like "we do not decide" or "we need not reach." That is the boundary of the holding.
6. Read the first and last paragraphs of the majority opinion. The first states the question in the Court's own words. The last states the conclusion.
7. Skim the dissent's first page. Dissenters state in plain terms what they think the majority got wrong. That is a useful check on whether you understood the holding.
8. Now go back to the headline and ask: does it describe the holding, or the effect, or the winner?

That is ten minutes. If you want a method for following a case through argument and opinion, How to Follow a Supreme Court Oral Argument, From the Line to the Transcript shows how, and Ten Words the Press Uses About the Supreme Court, Translated for Normal People tests the vocabulary reporters use about the Justices. The site's media watch page tracks other cases of framing.

What the Founders would say

The press that frames these stories is protected by the First Amendment, which says Congress "shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." That is exactly right. The press must be free to be wrong, and the remedy for a bad frame is a better one, not a gag. Freedom of the press in the Founding era meant, among other things, that nobody needed a license to print an opinion, and a free people was expected to read for itself.

Hamilton made a related point in Federalist 78 about the courts: the judiciary has neither force nor will, but merely judgment, and its power rests on the public's confidence in its reasoning. A Court's reasoning is its only authority, and the authority is lost if the public never sees the reasoning. A press that reports only the result, and a public that accepts it, leaves the judges to be judged by their winners and losers instead of by what they wrote. Federalist 78 Called Courts the Least Dangerous Branch. Was Hamilton Right? explains why that matters.

So read the opinion. Not all of it. The first page and the holding. You will be astonished how often the thing you were angry about, or cheering, was a thing the Court did not do.

The case in brief

1. An opinion decides a legal question, and coverage tends to report the winner and the biggest version of the effect instead.
2. Dobbs returned the abortion question to elected representatives and banned nothing; Shelby County struck the Section 4(b) coverage formula and left Section 2 in place; Citizens United struck the ban on independent corporate and union spending, upheld disclosure eight to one, and left direct contribution limits alone.
3. The gap comes from deadlines, the need for a winner, a vocabulary of effect, and a frame that makes the Court look extreme.
4. A syllabus read in ten minutes, with a look at the word "held," the vote and what the Court declined to decide, will correct most headlines.
5. A free press must be free to be wrong, and a free people must be willing to read the opinion.

What you can do: the next time a Court ruling is in the news, open the opinion, read the syllabus and the holding, and decide whether the headline matched before you share it.