Sudoku for Supreme Court geeks

It's a game to try to guess how the Court will rule on a case and who will be writing a decision based on how many decisions each justice has already written from a session. And, based on that analysis, Court watchers have guessed how the Court is going to rule ans who is going to write the decision on the race-based school-desegregation plans in the cases heard in the Fall term. The answer:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. With a 5 to 4 majority. In favor of striking down the school admission plans.

"At the end of the term, while everyone's sitting around and waiting for the opinions, it's a pretty good parlor game," said Thomas C. Goldstein, a Supreme Court practitioner at the law firm Akin Gump, who started a discussion with the Roberts prediction at Scotus Blog, a Web site he founded.

He's far from alone in foreseeing that outcome, and here's the group reasoning:

Of the cases that were heard during the court's oral argument session that began Nov. 27 and ended Dec. 5, only three have not yet been announced. Two of them are the race cases, the other an equal-pay dispute. Every justice has written an opinion from that session except Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

If there is a conservative majority ready to rule against the programs, as many thought likely after hearing the questioning at the argument, it would make sense for Roberts to assign himself what will be one of the court's most closely watched cases of the term.