What seemed like an innocuous comment during oral arguments on October 3rd, 1994 by Richard Seamon, attorney for the Department of Justice in the case of United States v. Shabani led to lengthy retort. Seamon, prepared to end the arguments stated, “Unless the Court has further questions, I have nothing further.” Justice Breyer in his…
Category: 2022 Term
Citing Down the Ladder
One of if not the most well-known sentences from a Supreme Court opinion comes in the form of John Marshall’s line in Marbury v. Madison, “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.” This short sentence signified a power grab whereby the Supreme Court took on judicial review…
Supreme Court Justice Power Index at the End of the 2022 Term
Who is the powerful Supreme Court Justice on the current Court? This question, while interesting to think about, leads to several subsequent questions, primarily to do with what is meant by “powerful.” The vagueness with which we define power leads to a near impossibility in coming up with a legitimate and valid answer. Other studies…
Another One Bites the Dust: End of 2022/2023 Supreme Court Term Statistics
[This piece was co-authored by Jake Truscott, a Post-Doctoral Researcher for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement] It has been another crazy year before the Supreme Court as the justices took up important cases related to Affirmative Action, student debt, voting, and religious rights among other issues. The justices decided several of these important cases along ideological…
The Highest Cites in the Land
The Supreme Court is known as the “Highest Court in the Land,” but even this highest court needs to justify its choices. Scholar Martin Shapiro referred to this universal judicial norm as part of the logic of the triad. Under this logic, judges maintain a system of trust with the public by providing seemingly neutral…
Term Update: We Haven’t Seen This in Over 25 Years
So far this term the liberal justices on the Supreme Court only have a combined four dissents through 26 argued and signed decisions. That is about a 5% dissent rate. For some perspective, the Court released 26 signed decisions in argued cases through May of last term. By that point the liberal justices accumulated 26…
What’s Going on So Far This Term
It is ironic that we can consider May in a Supreme Court Term early when the term is set to complete in just one month, but that is exactly where we are. The justices have cleared 19 cases from their caseload (18 if we discount In Re: Grand Jury which was dismissed after oral argument)…
A New Landscape Unfolds: Supreme Court Oral Arguments in the 2022-2023 Term
In a term marked by arguments flowing past their allotted times, the justices had quite a bit to say in the 2022-2023 oral argument sessions. Of course the justices could properly focus their energy on the paltry 59 cases for argument. That number is quite a far cry from 197 arguments the Court heard in…
Unusual Moves, a Slow Start, and What We Should Expect from the Remainder of the Term
April is the final month of oral arguments for the 2022-2023 Supreme Court Term and although the Court has released few decisions in orally argued cases, there are several storylines worth tracking. Beyond the slow pace of decisions, Justice Jackson is in her first term and has written the majority opinion in a single case,…
Even Best Friends Sometimes Disagree
Supreme Court Justices voting practices are fairly predictable. For instance, most decisions are unanimous. Since the longest serving justice on the Court, Justice Thomas joined the Court in 1991 42.65% of argued cases have returned unanimous votes. The Court also tends to reverse lower court decisions. The justices voted to reverse the lower court decision…
The Last Justice Standing
After the Supreme Court released its most recent set of decisions last Thursday, SCOTUSBlog’s James Romoser captured a unique insight of the justices’ votes so far – newly appointed Justice Jackson is the only justice so far who has been entirely in the majority in each of the Court’s six decisions. This was potentially surprising…
SCOTUS Predictions Based on Lower Court Judges
One of the best ways to forecast future events is through past trends. The U.S. Supreme Court hears the majority of its cases after a decision is rendered by one of the 13 federal courts of appeals. Since there are 13 circuits and the Supreme Court takes somewhere between 60 and 70 cases each term…
Empirical SCOTUS 