Much of the Supreme Court landscape has changed since Justice Breyer joined the Supreme Court in 1994. Breyer is currently the second longest-tenured justice on the Court after Justice Thomas. The ideological balance has changed from a 5-4 conservative/liberal composition with the occasional swing vote from Justice Kennedy in the middle. With the three Trump-appointed…
Month: January 2022
Guess Which Justice is Taking the Most Important Cases and Other Details from Last Term
To start, some of you must be asking how one measures “important cases,” especially when there is no objective measure for this. These measures might also show the difficulty in each case or case complexity, but “most important cases” seem to encompass these other adjectives. Still, measuring the most important cases might seem a subjective…
Supreme Workhorses
A common refrain lately within circles interested in the Supreme Court has to do with the Court’s diminishing (or diminished) workload. The Court clearly has taken fewer cases in recent years than it did farther in the past. The 53 signed opinions by the Court for the 2019 term marked the lowest opinion total in…
Empirical SCOTUS 