One trope that was often repeated this past Supreme Court term was that the Court did not take on a particularly exciting caseload. Evidence for this comes in the form of the unprecedented level of agreement among the justices compounded by the eight justice composition for most of the term that wished to avoid 4-4…
Month: August 2017
Crunching Data From this Past Term
It has been almost two months since the completion of the Supreme Court’s 2016 term. Scholars and analysts have pored over Court’s decisions. SCOTUSBlog released its Stat Pack which contains many interesting statistical trends and details from the term. Each term, a group of professors now organized through the Washington University in St. Louis School of…
Loud Voices From Below
The Supreme Court only takes a small fraction of cases petitioned to it every year and there is no perfect formula for ensuring a case makes its way to the Court. There are, however, several signals that can help a case along the way. Much of what matters has to do with uniformity in case…
An Uphill Battle for the Court’s Liberals
“[I]f a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs…
Empirical SCOTUS 