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: 2019 Term
Elites at Cert
The odds are stacked against attorneys seeking to have their cases heard by the Supreme Court. While attorneys working on cases accepted for review have a 50/50 chance of success on the merits, the average likelihood of a cert grant is around 1%. Certain attorneys though have a much higher success rate (also documented in…
A Sometimes-Forgotten Link: The Importance of State Court Cases Before SCOTUS
Supreme Court review is often thought of as mainly monitoring the federal courts and circuit splits. The reasons for this are obvious. Rule 10 of the Supreme Court Rules, the only (albeit non-compulsory) rule about what types of cases the Court should hear on cert, speaks about circuit splits before other types of cases. Surprising…
SCOTUSBlog Final Stat Pack OT 2019
The Court released its final merits decisions for the 2019 term on Thursday 7/9/2020. We released the Stat Pack the following day which includes a bevy of statistical analyses tracking the decisions from this past term. The accompanying post begins: A Supreme Court term unlike any other has finally come to an end. In March,…
Drilling into the Content of the Supreme Court’s May Arguments
The Supreme Court heard some of the most important cases of the term in a month when there almost were no arguments at all. The Court canceled its March and April sitting due to COVID-19. With flexible ingenuity, it then rescheduled ten arguments for May, which was the first time the Court had anything near…
Changes in Supreme Court Oral Argument Format: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
With a week of telephonic Supreme Court oral arguments under the belt we now have meaningful data points to compare old style oral arguments with the new framework. These new arguments were not without mishaps, however, as both justices and attorneys attempted to navigate this new terrain. With the Supreme Court transcript data and audio…
Younger vs. Older
Yesterday the Court released a divided decision in Georgia v Public.Resource.Org with Justices Roberts, Kagan, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh in the majority and Justices Alito, Thomas, Ginsburg, and Breyer in dissent. As several folks pointed out, this was an interesting split of the justices since the majority was composed of the five younger justices on…
Something We Haven’t Seen in the Supreme Court Since the Civil War
The Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865 and the Court was affected by the war like all national institutions. During the second year of the war in 1862 the Court decided 41 cases by signed decisions and in 1864 the Court decided 57 such cases. According to the United States Supreme Court Database,…
Things We Haven’t Seen Before at the Outset of a Roberts Court Term
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is traditionally one of the most active justices at the beginning of each term. It should come as no surprise therefore that she authored three of the Court’s first 13 decisions for the 2019 Supreme Court term . She tends to have the backing of the Court in these early term decisions…
Some More About This Term
This short post contains data about the questions the Supreme Court seeks to resolve this term. It contains a chart of the most frequent words in the questions after common English words like “the,” “and,” and “of” and words with two or fewer characters were eliminated. Next is a chart of the top two or…
About this Term: OT 2019
Even though not all briefs are filed in cases that will be argued before the Supreme Court this term, the interest level in the Court’s cases is at an apex. There was a lot of hype leading into this term, as it is the first where all nine sitting justices have at least a term…
Activist or Restrained, the Current Court’s Movement is Often Directed by the Chief
At the helm of the Senate impeachment trial, Chief Justice Roberts is engaged in politics in a manner distinct from any other role he has or will play on the Supreme Court. At the impeachment trial he presides over the Senate, mainly ruling on procedural issues, but has also shown a willingness to exert control of the…
Empirical SCOTUS 