ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the justices' 2014-term opinions, and particularly their linguistic treatment of group agents, foreshadowed some of the civic and political bewilderment that has followed the term. In every 2014-term case involving public-sector actors or litigants, the justices refer willy-nilly to individuals, officers, and groups as agents that can interact freely and directly with one another. The justices' prevailing habits of alternately assuming and denying the existence of one group agent, and avoiding consideration of their characteristics, generate a host of problems. The justices often have trouble describing their own institutional role without resorting to cliche. This difficulty has far-reaching implications for the justices' discourse, sometimes apparently affecting their reasoning about otherwise unrelated matters. Many of the justices' efforts to characterize the judicial role, directly or indirectly, are similarly paradoxical. Intermediate appellate courts in the federal judicial system make most decisions in panels of three judges.
