There is and has been a clear ideological division between the more conservative and liberal Justices on the Court, especially in cases with high profile civil rights issues such as marriage equality. A not so often examined aspect of this fissure has to do with the cohesion of the individual voting blocs. For instance, Justice…
Month: May 2016
Interruptions and References
Supreme Court oral arguments are traditionally thought of as a time for the Justices to interact with and ask question of attorneys in a case. One of the lesser thought of aspects of oral arguments has to do with the interaction among the Justices. Over the years several studies and articles have looked at this…
Will Ghosts of Past Decisions Come Back to Haunt This Term?
Do Supreme Court Justices abide by the Court’s past precedents in cases where such precedents are not overruled? Political Scientists have long debated this question with differing accounts based on ideological theory, strategic theory, and post-behavioralism. Without getting lost in the weeds of this debate this post takes a look at the Justices’ votes in…
Peering Into Merrick Garland
If there’s one thing that can be said about the current Supreme Court vacancy, it is that it will not likely be filled anytime soon. Judge Garland has sat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals since 1997 and has been the Chief Judge on the Circuit since 2013. With the benefit of time and the…
The Road to Zubik, Incoherence, and Indecision
Today the Court avoided ruling on the merits in Zubik v. Burwell, a case pitting religious beliefs against government healthcare mandates, by sending the case back down to the lower courts with a per-curiam opinion. This was one of the most anticipated rulings of the Term and so this decision is perceived as a letdown for…
The Most Effective Friends of the Court
Amicus curiae briefs abound in the U.S. Supreme Court. The rules on filing are sufficiently loose that almost anyone with the necessary funds and that is able to follow the proper filing procedures can file an amicus brief. According to Justice Ginsburg these briefs along with other secondary sources can aid the Court in its…
OT 2015 Case Origination
(image from USCourts.gov) This post looks at the sources of the cases the Supreme Court heard this Term. It has two sections (divided into tables). The first contains each case (following SCOTUSBlog’s list of cases for the term) with four columns of data: the lower court, the lower court’s authoring judge’s name, any dissenting judges that…
The State of the States Before the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court Justices never appeared less satisfied with responses during an oral argument this Term than they did with those in Birchfield v. North Dakota. Mark Joseph Stern described in an article for Slate, “Ever wondered what it felt like on the Titanic when that iceberg ripped the hull? The sensation, I suspect, was quite similar…
Oral Arguments OT 2015: A Look Back
On Wednesday April 29th the Supreme Court Justices heard their final oral argument of the Term with McDonnell v. United States. The Justices heard a total of 69 arguments from October 2015 through April 2016 (not accounting separately for consolidated dockets; links to all of the transcripts, audio, and information about all of the cases…
Empirical SCOTUS 