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…
Category: Citations
Roberts Court Jurisprudence: What Was and What Will Come
What is the Supreme Court’s most important work? Although peoples’ answers may vary, one of the Court’s most important outputs is its opinion language. Through its precedent, the Court develops standards for people to follow and for lower courts to articulate in subsequent decisions. Precedent guides decision making from the top down and affects outcomes…
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…
Locating Weak Causal Strands in the Justices’ Opinions
In the introduction to the eye opening work on the Supreme Court certiorari process Deciding to Decide, author H.W. Perry summarizes the Court’s lack of institutional transparency. Perry wrote, “Although some rules are published, most of the internal procedures are by consensus, are unpublished, and are frequently unknown” (p. 17). Perry goes on, “We on…
The Recent Role of Separate Opinions
In a 2015 article for the Washington Post reviewing Melvin Urofsky’s book Dissent and the Supreme Court, the David Cole wrote, “What determines a great dissent…is not necessarily the power of the argument but the shifting tides of history…History, not rhetoric or cogency, determines whether a dissent wins out in the long run. Yet by articulating a…
What the Justices Cited in OT 2018
During the 2018 term, the Supreme Court heard 67 oral arguments leading to decisions. The justices’ opinions cited briefs filed in these cases and law articles approximately 601 times. These citations were from a total of approximately 330 briefs and articles. The citations were primarily clustered in certain cases. For instance, 30 cases or about…
Don’t Cite Me Like That
An interesting debate was reignited by the Chief Justice’s majority opinion in Minnesota Voter’s Alliance v. Mansky. This debate surrounds the effect of oral arguments, if any, on the justices’ decisions. Here is one of the sections from Roberts’ majority opinion in that case that refers to oral arguments. In this example, as is the case…
One Opinion More Complex Than the Next
The Supreme Court finally appears decently situated to complete its decision making for the term. Some holdups are still in play including the long since argued case of Gill v. Whitford. Gill was argued 255 days from the next possible opinion release date of June 14, 2018. Only 10 cases have taken longer to decide…
Is a Recipe for Justice Kennedy a Recipe for Success?
The puns are endless with a case that goes by the name Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The stakes though are no laughing manner. If the Court decides all of the issues brought up in the case, boundaries of the First Amendment doctrine may be rewritten as could the defining lines between religious…
Developing the Court’s Precedent 2016
Through the course of a single term, the Supreme Court went from a “boring” eight member body to one apparently itching to take on polarizing political issues. This transformation took place in the Court’s first full term without Justice Scalia since 1986. Some (including Justice Breyer) speculated that Scalia’s absence would have a large impact…
Five SCOTUS Decisions Making Waves in the Lower Courts
The 2015/2016 Supreme Court Term had its fair share of significant cases. Some of these cases have effected and will effect large swaths of the population. The ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, for instance, sets guidelines for acceptable state regulations on abortion. Evenwel v. Abbott clarifies how states may draw legislative districts, thus…
Professors as Amici
Amicus briefs filed before the Supreme Court are most commonly used as a tool for interest groups use to convey their positions (for a look at interest groups’ use of amicus briefs see this article by Professor Paul Collins). This is not the sole use of such briefs though. Non-party individuals and groups that have an…
Empirical SCOTUS 