How easy are Supreme Court opinions to read? There is quite a bit of variation in the Court’s writings based on the case facts, Justice, clerks, majority coalition, and prior case law involved. Complicating this question further is the difficulty in measuring reading ease. As with measuring writing quality, there are subjective elements that even…
Category: Attorneys/Firms
The Summer Pipeline
Supreme Court Justices make few official decisions during the summer. Generally, these relate to emergency matter that require quick injunctive responses. For lawyers, however, the situation is quite different (as the saying goes “time and tide wait for no man”). While the Court does not rule on cases during the summer, cert petitions accumulate just…
Cert Filing Leaders
Chambers and Partners regularly releases highly regarded law firm rankings and comparisons. One of these guides compares top appellate firms. The firms detailed in Chambers’ list are top players in the Supreme Court and employ many of the attorneys with the most extensive Supreme Court expertise. While these firms are recognized for their work in…
Bringing in the Big Guns
In a cautious and almost trepidatious manner the Supreme Court has slowly filled in part of its docket for the 2016 Term. The correlation between this slow-moving approach to cert and the empty seat on the Court is unmistakable. There are currently eight cases scheduled for argument in October. The Court already granted cert in…
SCOTUS Scorecard Pt. 2: The Firm Side of the Story
The top Supreme Court litigators from this past Term were composed of a group of well-known names within circles that track cases moving through the Court. Examining these attorneys, however, only conveys part of the story of the actors involved in this litigation. From the perspective of the client representation there is a structure that goes…
SCOTUS Scorecard 2015/2016 Pt. 1: Experience is Key
Now that the 2015 Supreme Court is complete, it is a perfect time to inspect the case outcomes. My previous post examined the winning attorneys from each oral argument. Many of the attorneys involved are from a small division of firms and groups focused on Supreme Court practice (or from larger firms with specialized appellate practices) and are…
Oral Argument Winners 2015/2016
Image by: Carlos Barria/Reuters This week marks the end of the 2015 Supreme Court Term. There are a ton of data to sort through to better understand the repercussions of the cases and the actors involved. One way to analyze the data is simply by looking at the attorneys that were most successful at oral argument…
The Lucky Ones: Cert Grants 2016
Sixteen. That is the number of cases that the Supreme Court is currently slated to hear in the 2016 Term. This number in itself is exceptionally low for this time of year, although in terms of absolute case grants it is not exponentially far behind years past (see below). For those who follow the Supreme…
Lessons In Not Throwing Caution To the Wind
It seems a fitting tribute to include a post about the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) on the day the current Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli, steps down. The OSG is one of main gatekeepers to the Supreme Court’s review. Multiple times every Term the Justices request the OSG to express views on whether or…
Peering Into Merrick Garland
If there’s one thing that can be said about the current Supreme Court vacancy, it is that it will not likely be filled anytime soon. Judge Garland has sat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals since 1997 and has been the Chief Judge on the Circuit since 2013. With the benefit of time and the…
The Most Effective Friends of the Court
Amicus curiae briefs abound in the U.S. Supreme Court. The rules on filing are sufficiently loose that almost anyone with the necessary funds and that is able to follow the proper filing procedures can file an amicus brief. According to Justice Ginsburg these briefs along with other secondary sources can aid the Court in its…
The State of the States Before the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court Justices never appeared less satisfied with responses during an oral argument this Term than they did with those in Birchfield v. North Dakota. Mark Joseph Stern described in an article for Slate, “Ever wondered what it felt like on the Titanic when that iceberg ripped the hull? The sensation, I suspect, was quite similar…
Empirical SCOTUS 