You also forget that a justice might feel more comfortable with ruling in opposition so that he/she can write the dissent, but if his/her vote was a swing vote, the justice might have second thoughts about that. It's easy to vote in opposition when you know it doesn't matter - and then, hey, you get to write the position for the losing side.
> You also forget that a justice might feel more comfortable with ruling in opposition so that he/she can write the dissent, but if his/her vote was a swing vote, the justice might have second thoughts about that.
This doesn't make any sense. Justices vote in the majority while disagreeing with part or all of the majority opinion all the time. The mechanism for complaining about the majority reasoning is the same in either case: you write a separate opinion detailing your personal analysis of the case. That opinion is called a "dissent" if you voted against the majority and a "concurrence" if you voted with the majority.
There is no concept of "the dissent". Any dissenting justice is free to write one; it is routine for one case to have multiple dissents.
