Supreme Court decisions come down to coalitions and are often predicated on the question of whether a justice can garner at least four additional other votes to support their position in a case. Sometimes these coalitions are easy to come by. The Court decides somewhere around 33% or more of its cases on average per…
Category: Cases
Two Pieces to the Puzzle: Long Conference Petitions and Granted Cases for OT 2023
[completed with the help of Jake Truscott who gathered data for this post] The 2022 Supreme Court term concluded this past June. Since then, the Justices have been on break. In the past several justices go on vacation (some of the downsides to such travel have been documented as well) while others teach in exciting…
Congressional Responses to Dobbs
The Supreme Court released its opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health on June 24, 2022. Within a little over a month of the release, a robust discussion developed within both Houses of Congress on whether there should be a legislative response to this decision. Congress is notorious for lots of discussion combined with little…
A New Look at Who’s Activist and Restrained on the Court
This country’s founders could not have anticipated the current power of the federal judiciary. Alexander Hamilton wrote to this effect in Federalist Paper #78, “The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take…
How the Court’s Decisions Limit the National Electorate
This post looks at the Supreme Court’s election law jurisprudence under the Roberts Court. Supreme Court opinions and applications were searched from 2005 through the present for the term “election.” All cases were examined and any that related to elections or voting procedures were maintained in the dataset. Cases were broken down across several issues…
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…
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…
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…
The Singular Relationship Between the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court
With the Supreme Court term about to begin many eyes will be on a small handful of cases. The interest in these cases generally surrounds certain salient case issues. In this respect this term has a lot to offer. The Court will review the federal government’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. It will look at the constitutionality…
A Class of Their Own: The Supreme Court’s Recent Take on Class Actions
Supreme Court decisions tend to impact more than just the individuals named in a lawsuit. Supreme Court Rule 10, the one official written description of factors that may lead to a higher likelihood of a cert grant focuses primarily on areas with inconsistent court decisions across the country. One of the rationales behind this disparate…
The Wide Arc of the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court now hears around 70 arguments a term and each case tends to have issues unique from others on the Court’s docket. After the Court’s merits docket is assembled each term though, similarities between cases become apparent and these similarities may present an area of law where the Court is more invested and…
Looking Back to Make Sense of the Court’s (Relatively) Light Workload
There have been interesting discussions as of late regarding the Supreme Court’s light workload and how it is getting even lighter. Evidence of this decline can be found in quantitative analyses of the Supreme Court’s work. It is a not a subject addressed by any member of the Court. The Chief Justice, for example, did mention…
Empirical SCOTUS 