In my second year of law school, one of the professors asked a question about something in an opinion and one of classmates very assuredly said, "That's just dicta," to which the professor replied, "But they said it, didn't they?"wserra wrote:From what I see, the problem really isn't quoting dicta instead of a holding. Dicta are frequently quite useful in the real life practice of law, and tend to be inaccurate only when subsequent law develops a line of reasoning past the original case.
The line between "holding" and "dicta" is not so clear as lawyers sometimes claim. The core of the holding (e.g., that the plaintiff wins) is largely meaningless without knowing *why* the plaintiff wins. And yet, in explaining the reasons for the decision, a court might say things that can't be taken too far from the facts of the actual case.
To me, the real issue is this: Under all the circumstances of the decision, such as the nature of the issues argued, the facts, and the care that the court used in explaining it's reasoning, how much reliance can we place on that particular statement as a general rule of law?
Take for example, the statement from Stratton’s Independence, Ltd. v. Howbert, 231 U.S. 399, 415 (1913), that “the earnings of the human brain and hand when unaided by capital ... are commonly dealt with as income in legislation.” That statement is "dicta" by any definition, because the decision itself had nothing whatsoever to do with wages or earned income, and yet I would say that the statement can be relied on and should be relied on.
The actual issue before the court was whether a mining company was entitled to a deduction for mineral depletion in calculating "income." The claim was that the extraction of ore was not entirely "income" because, once the ore was extracted and sold, it was gone and could never be replaced, and so it was more like capital than income. The court replied that the same could be said of the time and effort spent by workers, and yet what they earn is usually considered to be income.
One of the things that I find persuasive about the quotation is the casual certainty it conveys. It briefly and curtly dismissed an argument with an "everyone knows" kind of statement. And it was not about an arcane issue of law, but about the treatment of the wages that are earned by most Americans, so it was an issue that all of the judges on the court would be acquainted with.
So it might be dicta, but it is dicta that can be cited and relied upon, and it has been cited and relied upon.
Which illustrates one of the reasons that I have found law to be so interesting. It's more than logic and analysis, and often encompasses judgments and a kind of artistry.
