Judicial opinion

A judicial opinion is a form of legal opinion written by a judge or a judicial panel in the course of resolving a legal dispute, providing the decision reached to resolve the dispute, and usually indicating the facts which led to the dispute and an analysis of the law used to arrive at the decision.A majority opinion is a judicial opinion agreed to by more than half of the members of a court. A majority opinion sets forth the decision of the court and an explanation of the rationale behind the court's decision.The 'slip' opinion is the second version of an opinion. It is sent to the printer later in the day on which the 'bench' opinion is released by the Court. Each slip opinion has the same elements as the bench opinion—majority or plurality opinion, concurrences or dissents, and a prefatory syllabus—but may contain corrections not appearing in the bench opinion.An Advisory opinion or Certified question are those issued by a court or administrative body or panel that do not dispose of a particular case. They often address a general issue or matter, or are issued in a case that is being heard outside their jurisdiction. They are not issued for the purposes of deciding a particular case before the court in question.A 2011 peer-reviewed research paper suggested that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions, such as the timing of a parole hearing in relation to the judges' meal breaks. However, a re-examination of the data found that these conclusions had been based on erroneous assumptions.