The United States Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) within the U.S. Department of Justice has its hands full with Supreme Court litigation. Granted, “busy” is a relative term as the OSG has had fewer Supreme Court filings this Term than it has since 2010 (which will almost assuredly still be the case at the end…
Category: 2015 Term
The Regulars: Supreme Court Litigation 2015-2016
Since 2001 the Supreme Court has written full opinions in 67-75 orally argued cases per Term. We are certain not to see more than 75 this Term and nowhere near the 151 such cases in the 1982 and 1983 Terms, which were high points for the second half of the 20th century. With fewer cases,…
The Biggest Supreme Court Cases of the Term
This Term the Supreme Court decided to tackle cases dealing with a variety of hot-button issues ranging from the right to an abortion (or more specifically the right for who can provide an abortion) to the meaning of “one person, one vote.” These issues affect a profound portion of the American populace. Correspondingly these cases often make headlines,…
A Shift in Oral Arguments: An Update
I recently wrote a post where I looked at Justice Scalia’s final ten oral arguments and compared them to the first ten oral arguments after his death. There have been several oral arguments since then and with the data from those arguments I am able to expand the timeframe of that analysis. In this post I examine…
The First Nineteen
(image via Boston Globe) So far, this has been an odd and unique Supreme Court Term in several respects. For instance, Justices Thomas, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor all dissented in the same case (in DirecTV v. Imbrugia – Justice Thomas’ dissent was very different from Justice Ginsburg’s which Justice Sotomayor joined). We’ve had a Justice pass…
Justice Sotomayor Shaking Up Post-Scalia Oral Arguments
f (image via Los Angeles Times) It has been over a month since Justice Scalia, one of the most engaged Justices in oral arguments since he was confirmed to the Court in 1986, passed away on February 13, 2016. For all of the commentary surrounding his passing and on the questions surrounding the process of…
Each Case in Approximately Ten Words
Why approximately ten words? Well in reality it is in ten n-grams or phrases of one to a few words. The words not only provide a pithy synopsis of each case, but they also give the parties’ framings of the cases. I used a method known as keyword extraction to locate these phrases (more about…
The Last Leg of the Term
(image from loc.gov) The end of oral arguments for this Supreme Court Term is around the corner. With 21 cases left (not counting joined dockets in the same case) I compiled some stats on what is still to come. This post looks at the attorneys, firms, and parties in these 21 cases. There are two sections of…
empiricalscotus.com 