Normally, appellate courts (or panels) are staffed with an odd number of judges to avoid a tie.
In the United Kingdom and many other common law countries, the disposition in a majority opinion is phrased in the future tense as a recommendation.
The main reason for phrasing dispositions as recommendations is that historically, the highest court in the United Kingdom was the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, which adhered to the legal fiction that its opinions were merely speeches delivered in debate in the House of Lords, upon motion by a member of the Appellate Committee to consider its "report" on a particular legal matter.
[2] There was no final decision binding upon the parties until the House of Lords had formally exercised parliamentary sovereignty by voting on such pro forma motions to accept the Committee's recommendations.
[1][2] In contrast, U.S. judges are not mere appendages of royal authority; as expressly envisioned by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No.