The United States government represented by the Solicitor General is the most frequent party before the U.S. Supreme Court. These regular appearances will be quite pronounced over the next two weeks. The Supreme Court hears oral arguments in ten more cases before the end of the Term, and a representative from the Office of the Solicitor…
Category: justices
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…
A Shift in Oral Arguments: An Update
I recently wrote a post where I looked at Justice Scalia’s final ten oral arguments and compared them to the first ten oral arguments after his death. There have been several oral arguments since then and with the data from those arguments I am able to expand the timeframe of that analysis. In this post I examine…
Justice Sotomayor Shaking Up Post-Scalia Oral Arguments
f (image via Los Angeles Times) It has been over a month since Justice Scalia, one of the most engaged Justices in oral arguments since he was confirmed to the Court in 1986, passed away on February 13, 2016. For all of the commentary surrounding his passing and on the questions surrounding the process of…
Atypical Oral Arguments In Puerto Rico v. Franklin CA Trust
On Tuesday the Court heard arguments in Puerto Rico v. Franklin Cal. Tax-Free Trust a case that examines whether Congress precluded Puerto Rico from the ability to restructure its public utility debt. Specifically the case looks at whether Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code applies to Puerto Rico. Much of the case and the arguments…
Much Ado About Nothing?
Today the Supreme Court decided the seemingly innocuous case of Hawkins v. Community Bank of Raymore. This case dealt with the liability of spousal guarantors under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. On any other day this ruling might have gone unnoticed. The decision is one line reading, “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided…
How Does Garland Compare?
Courtesy of data from the Federal Judicial Center I have compiled statistics for each current Supreme Court Justice as well as for Justice Scalia and Judge Garland. This should give you some idea of how Garland compares to the current Justices as well as to the Justice who sat on the seat that he will potentially take….
The Age Effect
With a Supreme Court nominee most likely coming in the next day or so to fill Justice Scalia’s seat, there is much speculation on whether the choice will be Merrick Garland or Sri Srinivasan. If age has a large effect (which is often the case if Presidents wish to preserve their legacies after they leave…
Chief Justices’ Dissents (Vinson through Roberts)
(Image from New Yorker – 2007) A Twitter thread this morning started between Jeffrey Rosen and Kenneth Jost describes the number of dissenting opinions authored by Chief Justices – specifically comparing the number authored by Chief Justices Marshall and Taft (with relatively low number each) with Chief Justice Roberts (relatively higher comparatively). I thought it…
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). …
Forecasting Votes in Hellerstedt
On March 2nd, the Court heard oral arguments in perhaps the most publicized case of the Term – Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (No. 15-274). The case brings into question Texas’ new controversial law limiting who can perform abortions. Prior to oral arguments expectations were already high that the Justices would split along ideological lines…
The Breyer Court? (Network Analysis of the Justices Votes in OT 2014)
In political science ideal points are the most common measure describing judges’ votes. The goal of ideal points in the study of courts is locating the relative political ideology of a judge on a scale of liberal to conservative. Of course what it actually means to be a conservative or liberal judge is somewhat contested….
Empirical SCOTUS 