Publications and citations are essential to the research academic. They help separate experts from novices in a given field. They provide metrics for universities to gauge the quality of their professors’ scholarship. In legal scholarship there is a particularly meaningful measure that distinguishes law from other disciplines: citations in published opinions. Supreme Court citations to…
Category: Citations
Redistricting Precedent in Light of Evenwel
The Supreme Court decided Evenwel v. Abbott this week – a case with vast implications for legislative districts. Some see the decision as snubbing Republicans by ruling that states and localities should use total rather than voting population to draw these districts. Other commentary views the ruling as sufficiently narrow to allow future litigation in the same…
Comparing Amicus Briefs in Evenwel v. Abbott
A friend of mine practicing in a large firm recently asked me about comparing documents for similarity. While his interests are from a transactional standpoint, the same methods can be used to compare documents within or between cases. To continue with the amicus brief trope from the last post, I thought it would be interesting…
Amicus Briefs and Oral Arguments in the Roberts Court
Do the Justices and their clerks do their homework by reading and analyzing amicus briefs prior to oral arguments? In preparation for a larger project, I thought it would be interesting to probe this question (this also seems timely given Adam Liptak’s column in the New York Times on a recent study examining amicus briefs). …