When I worked at EFF, I read a lot of news coverage (and forum discussions) of litigation, sometimes including litigation that I was working on. It was often ve

When I worked at EFF, I read a lot of news coverage (and forum discussions) of litigation, sometimes including litigation that I was working on. It was often very hard to get people to see larger context about issues like * in the course of a court case, a judge (or multiple judges from multiple courts) are asked to make many different decisions on many different legal issues; most of those don't end or determine the outcome of the overall case * indeed, some of the decisions are about minor issues and others are about major issues * some of the issues presented in a case may be "questions of first impression" where no court has ever addressed them before; these are potentially very important as a matter of precedent because they might affect how similar questions are viewed in other cases * other issues may be very longstanding or familiar ones * lawyers may be willing to bring cases with different degrees of novelty (e.g. relying entirely on an untested theory, or not!), and with different likelihoods of success * legal standards will often have many different elements, and one party may lose under a standard even though it met most of the elements (but not all of them) All of these are more complex from the natural impulse to say "hooray, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the good guys!" or "boo, the court made a decision in favor of the people I think are the bad guys!".