Justice Antonin Scalia went along with the decision, but he blasted his colleagues for "issuing opaque opinions".
"For 35 years," Mr. Abrams said, "I've been trying, with mixed success, to persuade judges that Justice Powell's singularly opaque concurring opinion should be read the way it turns out he meant it to be read.
Throughout the period, events moved so quickly that only in retrospect have some elements become clear; for example, that the opaque unanimous opinion by which the court decided the first appeal was intended as a considerably sharper warning to the Florida Supreme Court than its mild language and bland tone suggested.
In Hirota v. MacArthur, decided in 1948, the court ruled in an opaque nine-sentence opinion that Japanese citizens convicted and sentenced by an international military tribunal in Japan did not have access to habeas corpus in United States courts.
The justices indicated their concerns with the state court's opinion in an opaque manner that papered over, barely, their own differences.
Deciding which risk mitigating actions to pursue has largely been an intuitive endeavor, relying on expert opinions which are typically opaque.
WHAT some call opinion, others call interpretive journalism — a label as opaque as the practice.
"I had an opinion before I started researching, but then it became opaque".
"Under the flag of democracy, in the 1990s we received not a modern government, but an opaque fight among clans and numerous semifeudal fiefdoms," he wrote in an opinion article last month.
He showed me where Manafort's name was listed next to various opaque payments: a million dollars for "services," six hundred thousand for "sociology," a likely reference to opinion surveys.
