When I came to the desk today a student asked for help in finding all U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the past 10 years in which there was a dissenting opinion or dissenting opinion. It turned out that the student needed only one U.S. Supreme Court decision in which there was a dissenting opinion for a presentation in a class.
(Dissenting opinions are when the court is not unanimous in its decision. A 9-0 decision means there is no dissent, although if there is a vacancy on the court, it could be 8-0. There are many decisions in which there is a dissent. A judge may dissent in whole or in part from a decision, and other justices may or may not join the dissent, in whole or in part.)
To find all the decisions with dissents, we went to Westlaw campus, selected U.S. Supreme Court decisions and limited the time to the last ten years. Then we added dissenting as a keyword. This resulted in 648 decisions. You can look at the decision and there is a brief summary of the case and then which justice wrote the majority decision and which justices wrote dissenting opinions, and if other justices joined them in whole or in part.
On Lexis Nexis, the same type of search can be done but the longest time period was 5 years. This resulted in 328 decisions.
I asked the student if there were a subject he was interested in and he said privacy.
So we did a new search, with the limits mentioned before, and added privacy as a keyword and dissent or dissenting. There were 32 results, which is much more manageable for the student.