 The five conservative justices decided to involve the federal judiciary in a matter that could have been left to the states, while also expanding the previous US Supreme Court interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause.Meanwhile, the liberal justices all supported leaving the matter in the hands of a state and also sometimes advocated in favor of a narrower reading of existing Equal Protection Clause SCOTUS precedents.This increased the perceptions that the judges used their desired results to drive their reasoning, instead of using legal reasoning to arrive at a result.