Supreme Court oral arguments are not all what they seem. While at first blush they may appear to be an opportunity for attorneys to make their arguments before the judges, they often become instances for the justices to test out their theories of a given case and to gauge other justices’ positions on given topics. That is one of the reasons why the justices almost always direct the flow and tenor of each argument.

Justice Breyer, for instance, is notorious for his lengthy mid-argument orations.  While attorneys still often speak more than individual justices in each argument, they generally have little time to expound on points they feel important to the case unless these are of equal interest to one or more of the justices. Perhaps for this reason, new Supreme Court Guidelines (p. 7), state “The Court generally will not question lead counsel for petitioners (or appellants) and respondents (or appellees) during the first two minutes of argument.” These two uninterrupted minutes of speech should give the attorneys an opportunity to make points that otherwise would be lost in the mix of the justices’ questions.

This has potential to be a drastic change from past practice.  Last term, the attorney who had the shortest amount of time  for opening remarks before a justice interjected Michael Huston in Smith v. Berryhill. Huston spoke for 11 seconds before Justice Sotomayor jumped in with her first question (timing was measured from oral argument recordings on Oyez.org). This point in the transcript is shown below.

There were 33 instances last term where a merits party’s counsel spoke for 30 seconds or less to open an argument before a justice began with questions. The average amount of speaking time for introductory remarks across the 2018 term was just over 54 seconds. Only five attorneys crossed the two minute threshold during the term.  The longest uninterrupted opening remarks were from Tom Goldstein in Air & Liquid Systems v. Devries and Cecilia Wang in Nielsen v. Preap (Wang had the longest time to speak to open an argument at 280 seconds).

The justices differ in their frequencies of asking the first question in oral arguments. When looking across petitioner’s and respondent’s advocates opening remarks, the justices’ frequencies of asking the first question are shown below.

Sotomayor led the way by asking the first question over 31% of the time. She was followed by Ginsburg who asked the first question over 23% of the time and Roberts who asked the first question just over 19.5% of the time. The other justices had much lower frequencies of asking the first question.

Sotomayor was able to ask the first question almost one-third of the time because she was by far the fastest justice to the first question on average. The justices’ average times before asking the first question (when they were the first questioner) are shown below.

At 39 seconds Sotomayor was almost ten seconds quicker than Roberts who was the second fastest justice to the first question. On the other end of the spectrum, Kagan waited almost 76 seconds on average to ask her first question and Alito averaged over 92 seconds before he jumped in first.

The justices’ distributions of amount of time before asking the first question lends some context to explain their average rates.  The horizontal axis shows the amount of time to the first question in ten second intervals while the vertical axis (for each justice) is the number of times the justice asked the first question within this time interval.

Sotomayor’s numbers are skewed to the low end with her greatest amount of first questions in the 20 to 40 second bucket. Ginsburg also had the most first questions in the 20 to 40 second bucket but she asked more questions than Sotomayor around the one minute marker. Roberts also asked many early questions but he asked the most first questions between 40 and 60 seconds into an advocate’s remarks.  Kagan asked the most first questions between 60 and 80 seconds into an argument while Alito asked the most between 80 and 100 seconds into an argument. Aside from the justices that clustered their questions at earlier points in an argument, the remaining justices have much more balanced distributions across different time interval buckets.

When we split the advocates by sex there are few noticeable differences in how the justices entered into the arguments.

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were never the first justices to ask questions to a female advocate. Based on the proportion of female to male advocates, Alito asked a high rate of first questions to females, although his time to first question was at the high end for both male and female advocates.  Like Alito, most of the justices’ averages times were appreciably similar for male and female advocates. Since Kagan only asked a first question to a female advocate once, her 24 second average is not particularly meaningful.  Sotomayor appeared less apt to ask first questions to female advocates as well with her 40 first questions to male advocates compared to only three to female advocates.

So far in 2019 this two minute waiting principle seems fairly functional.

Justice Sotomayor stymied advocates from reaching the appropriate two minute marker in their opening remarks in two arguments at the beginning of this term. Twice advocates did not make it to the two minute marker on their own accords. Although the justices may seek to offer advocates more time to give uninterrupted remarks at the beginning of each argument, more work on the parts of the justices and advocates will need to be done before this intention becomes a consistent reality.

On Twitter: @AdamSFeldman