Opinion ID: 2509319
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 16

Heading: the dissenter's response to the court's critique

Text: ¶ 20 Appearing in a somewhat attenuated footnote form, the court's attribution of inconsistency between my dissent here and my concurrence in certain cited cases of yore is hollow in analytical profundity. Instead of attacking the dissenter's message the critique obliquely targets the messenger's voting pattern it views as discordant. This approach represents nowadays a dissent-chilling technique of choice. [32] It aims to bring discredit upon the daring herald of disagreeable thought. Though indeed an effective weapon, the device nonetheless robs the court of that intellectual richness which nourishes jurisprudence fed by a variety of insights. If the author of the court's opinion took the time to digest the authority on which reliance is placed, she would have doubtless discovered that the inconsistent cases are clearly distinguishable in procedural posture. All of them are free of the infirmities the dissent finds present in this case. In none of them was this court confronted, as it is here, by the absence of a timely-filed jurisdiction-conferring certiorari petition that is of critical moment in this proceeding.