In her NPR review of the Court’s term:

The outcomes this term were so much of a turnaround that the liberal justices looked positively serene, even perky, in June, while the tone of the conservative dissents was unusually harsh.

“The bombastic tone of the dissents this term was over the top, even for Justice Scalia, who has a blood-soaked pen at his desk,” Goldstein says.

“He wrote the nastiest thing I have read in any Supreme Court opinion,” says Charles Fried, who served as the government’s chief advocate in the Supreme Court during the Reagan administration.

Dellinger, who had the same job in the Clinton Administration, agrees.

“I’ve never seen that kind of really, deeply personal attack that basically says ‘The author of the opinion is not just wrong as a matter of law, he’s a jerk,’ ” says Dellinger.

That’s pretty much what Justice Scalia wrote about Justice Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric in the same-sex marriage case, calling it “pretentious,” and “egotistic,” and comparing it to “the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” If I had ever joined such a vague opinion, said Scalia, “even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, …. I would hide my head in a bag.”

Fried, now a professor at Harvard Law School, says that in some ways, Kennedy’s opinion provoked that reaction. He says that Kennedy should have focused on legal precedents instead of poetic passages. In particular, the court’s 1967 decision striking down state bans on interracial marriage, and two more recent decisions dealing with same-sex relations and marriage.

Those three court precedents dictated the result, Fried maintains, adding, “That is the law. Suck it up!”