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…
Category: 2016 Term
Not All Appeals Are Equal
Every year the lawyer research and ranking company Chambers & Partners (sometimes mentioned as C&P herein) puts out a list of top appellate lawyers and firms (in a previous post I looked at some of the listed firms’ cert performance). Chambers uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodology to come up with its various…
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…
That’s a SCOTUS Wrap
This term helped define what the Supreme Court may look like moving forward (of course discounting the possibility of other upcoming vacancies). With Justice Gorsuch’s seemingly conservative stances we appear to be moving back into a similar territory that existed with Justice Scalia on the Court. Although the orally argued cases this term were not…
The Justices in Oral Arguments 2016
Supreme Court oral arguments are the only times that litigators directly and verbally interact with the Justices about pending cases. The scholarship on whether these arguments factor into decision outcomes is mixed with some suggesting that the Justices come into oral arguments with predefined views in most cases while others suggesting that a variety of…
The Most Important Cases Already Argued This Term in SCOTUS
Over the last few years the Supreme Court has heard multiple landmark cases. The issues in these cases ranged from abortion to marriage equality and from affirmative action in schools to national healthcare. So far this Term the Court has not heard cases of the same magnitude. While cases like Beckles v. United States may…
Cert Analytics
The Supreme Court currently grants around eighty cases per year for its merits review. These cases tackle issues that often divide federal courts. The Court takes up some cases due to the national importance of resolving certain issues. With some of these cases that deal with issues that divide segments of the populations like abortion…
SCOTUS’ Slight Push Back at the End of 2016
Context By many metrics, and even by the Court’s standards, the Supreme Court has been quiet so far during the 2016 Term. While the Court has naturally taken fewer cases over recent years (exponentially fewer if we look back over the preceding decades), there is context for the most current muted effort. Much of the…
Four Takeaways From this Term’s 2016 SCOTUS Oral Arguments
We are experiencing a changing of the guard in the Supreme Court. There has been an usually long period with an eight-Justice dynamic which will very possibly continue on through the end of the Court’s current Term. Without some unprecedented occurrence, President-Elect Trump will nominate the next Justice to the Supreme Court who will likely…
Will the Election Help Normalize Business at the Supreme Court?
Prior to the Presidential Election there was profound uncertainty about the future of the Court. Before election night many believed Clinton would take the presidency and the democrats would look to move on the Garland nomination or otherwise nominate another candidate to the Supreme Court. With the Trump victory an entirely new chapter will be…
The Supreme Court and the Next Generation of Executive Power Cases
Over the past several months an entirely new class of executive power-related concerns have percolated through the national media and have begun burgeoning in federal courts. Prior to the election of President-Elect Trump, few knew about the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution and how it could be violated. Just this morning Trump’s comments on Twitter…
The Supreme Court’s Gender Balance
The Supreme Court heard five oral arguments this week. This was one of the two weeks with five arguments scheduled on the Supreme Court’s argument calendar so far in the 2016 Term. All other weeks in the first three argument sessions have fewer scheduled arguments. By comparison, the Justices heard six arguments in two of…
Empirical SCOTUS 