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2011 term per curiam opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States

2011 decisions of the US supreme court

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionFeb 13, 2026
Entity authorityQ4623267 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Supreme Court of the United States handed down fourteen per curiam opinions during its 2011 term, which began October 3, 2011 and concluded September 30, 2012.

Because per curiam decisions are issued from the Court as an institution, these opinions all lack the attribution of authorship or joining votes to specific justices. All justices on the Court at the time the decision was handed down are assumed to have participated and concurred unless otherwise noted.

Court membership

Chief Justice: John Roberts

Associate Justices: Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan

Cavazos v. Smith

565 U.S. 1 Decided October 31, 2011.

The Court reversed, for the third time, a judgment of the Ninth Circuit that had set aside the conviction of a woman for the death of her infant grandson attributed to shaken baby syndrome (SBS). The Court ruled that the Ninth Circuit's judgment, which had questioned the sufficiency of the expert testimony supporting SBS as the victim's cause of death, was contrary to the deferential standard of review established by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 for such petitions.

Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded.

Ginsburg filed a dissent, joined by Breyer and Sotomayor.

Smith's sentence was subsequently commuted by California Governor Jerry Brown to time served, releasing her after a decade in prison.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2011 term per curiam opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States” as 2011 decisions of the US supreme court. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2011, 2012, 1996—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where term, curiam and opinions can be independently traced.
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Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 2011 decisions of the US supreme court. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4623267. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2012 and 1996.

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This entry incorporates text from “2011 term per curiam opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.