2020 Term

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…

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…

Amy Coney Barrett’s First Day of Oral Arguments

The Supreme Court is now at full force with nine justices sitting in on oral arguments. Justice Barrett had her first day of arguments yesterday participating in both Salinas v. Railroad Retirement Bd. and United States Fish and Wildlife Serv. v. Sierra Club, Inc. Barrett’s first day of oral arguments was different from that of…