Just two weeks.

That’s the amount of time it took Justice John Paul Stevens to reverse his considered position as to when the U.S. Supreme Court should wade into murky jurisdictional waters to clear up contentious constitutional questions raised by cases of obvious importance.

The eldest justice was of one mind on June 14. "The command to guard jealously and exercise rarely our power to make constitutional pronouncements requires strictest adherence when matters of great national significance are at stake," Justice Stevens wrote for the five-justice majority, dismissing the Pledge of Allegiance case on procedural grounds. "Always we must balance ‘the heavy obligation to exercise jurisdiction’ against the ‘deeply rooted’ commitment ‘not to pass on questions of constitutionality’ unless adjudication of the constitutional issue is necessary," he warned.

Fourteen days later, however, Justice Stevens had completely changed his mind when another five-justice majority dismissed detainee Jose Padilla’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus because it had been filed in the wrong place. Vehemently dissenting from this elevation of procedure over substance, Justice Stevens blasted his colleagues for jurisdictionally sidestepping the constitutional concerns presented by the government’s detention of an American citizen as an "enemy combatant" in the War on Terrorism. "[T]his case raises questions of profound importance to the Nation," he insisted. "The arguments set forth by the Court do not justify avoidance of our duty to answer those questions."

So which rule is it?

Is it "improper" for the Supreme Court to "reach out to resolve a weighty issue of constitutional law" when "hard questions" beyond the Court’s jurisdiction "are sure to affect the outcome" of the case, as Justice Stevens held for the Court in the Pledge of Allegiance case? Or is it that the Supreme Court must decide the merits of a serious constitutional question, regardless of jurisdictional concerns, when the matter is of "profound importance to the Nation," as Justice Stevens argued just two weeks later in Padilla’s detention case?

Unfortunately, the High Court can provide no straightforward answers to these questions because neither rule is uniformly and consistently true — as ably demonstrated by Justice Stevens’ flip-flopping this June. Instead, the answer lies not in the legally sound choice between the superiority of this or that rule, but rather in the politically familiar explanation for why it can be this rule one day and that rule the next.

Indeed, if the combined decisions of this just-ended Supreme Court term provide any overall clarity for the High Court’s ad hoc jurisprudence, it is through the further development of a single underlying theme that explains the utter lack of any hard-and-fast adjudicatory rules. That jurisprudential theme is best summed up as one simple and universal winning strategy for Supreme Court gamesmanship — namely, it is far easier to get five justices to stand for nothing at all than it is to get those five justices to agree on anything that really matters.

Thus, in a term in which the U.S. Supreme Court raised "judicial minimalism" to an art form, it is this theme that best explains the failure of the High Court to provide a coherent constitutional roadmap for the lower courts and the whole country to follow. The Supreme Court increasingly wanders aimlessly from case to case, deciding each one not through the logical application and extension of prior precedent, but rather through the political invention and pronouncement of whatever result is most palatable to at least five of those currently sitting behind the grand mahogany bench.

In such a post-precedential world, Justice Stevens’ two-week 180 degree jurisprudential turn is easy to explain — though still hard to stomach. The High Court’s ability to dispose of cases based on jurisdictional concerns is not a categorical rule consistently honored by the current Supreme Court, rather it is but another brush with which the justices can paint on the constitutional canvas in order to avoid drawing any bright lines. And, viewed in such light, the decision by five or more justices to paint with that brush is not a decision to color outside the lines. It is, instead, simply another addition to their already free-formed masterpiece of constitutional impressionism.

Thus, as judges, scholars and citizens, alike, search in vain for an orderly and understandable theory of Supreme Court decisionmaking, Justice Stevens’ "supreme hypocrisy" may have clearly exposed the only constitutional rule there is: a majority of five means everything else is but a suggestion.