Royalty and Pronouns

SCOTUS released the groundbreaking 2nd Amendment decision today in DC v. Heller and, as I parse through early analysis of the linguistics and historical semantics of the majority decision, the use of a sub-form of the so-called "royal we" in the discussion of court decisions strikes me:

In United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, 179 (1939), we explained that...

Now this is interesting in that it paints a picture of unity in the way a court operates. A reasonable alternative might have been:

...the majority decision concluded that...

Instead, Scalia is both time traveling and invoking a certain personification of SCOTUS wherein its often bicameral nature is subordinated to the body as a whole. Unity out of many, indeed.