A Sunday morning article in the New York Times begins, “Last February, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sent his eight Supreme Court colleagues a confidential memo that radiated frustration and certainty [referring to the D.C. Circuit’s decision in the Donald Trump immunity case].” The article continues describing Roberts’ Feb. 22nd memo to the justices,…
Category: justices
Which Justice Writes the Most Important Decisions on the Supreme Court?
Chief Justice John Roberts heralded the significance of one of the biggest cases from last term, Trump v. United States, with the words, “This case poses a question of lasting significance: When may a former President be prosecuted for official acts taken during his Presidency? Our Nation has never before needed an answer. But in…
Amicus Citations in OT 2022 and 2023
On January 24, 2022 the United States Supreme Court granted cert in consolidated cases reviewing affirmative action programs at both Harvard and North Carolina Universities along with the Court’s precedent upholding affirmative action programs from the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger. By August of 2022, nearly 100 groups and individuals filed amicus briefs covering a…
Working Overtime
Supreme Court Justices have limited mandatory writing duties. Most of the justices are assigned majority opinions to draft. A few justices assign the majority opinion writing duties. This assignment is made by the Chief Justice if he is in the majority and otherwise by the most senior associate justice in the majority. Obviously a justice…
2023 Stat Review
Version: 1.1Released: July 1, 2024Citation: Feldman, A. & Truscott, J.S. (2024, July 1). Supreme Court 2023-2024 Stat Review (Version1.1). EmpiricalSCOTUS. Available at: https://empiricalscotus.com/Supplemental Data (.zip): HereUpdate Note (07/02/2024): Thank You to Josh Blackman for recognizing our miscoding of Campos-Chavez v. Garland. This and corresponding summary statistics have been updated. It feels like much longer than…
DELIA – From Empirical Data to an Operational Platform
This year’s SCOTUS term will have a huge impact on the practice of law, new litigation, and the data needed by the existing attorneys to present their cases. For example, the SEC v. Jarkesy decision upends the way the SEC (and potentially several other agencies) enforce their actions. The fall of Chevron with Loper Bright…
Moody v. NetChoice, LLC: New Dimensions of First Amendment Jurisprudence
As we all await the decision on Moody v NetChoice, we ran the oral argument and the transcript against our Optimized Legal Audio (OLA) platform to see what it ascertained about the justices’ leanings. The conclusions show possible surprises that appear consistent with our suppositions of votes in other cases yet to be decided. To…
Concurrences Are All the Rage
Concurrences have played an increasingly important role in Supreme Court decision-making over time. They are nothing new though. Looking as far back as 1971’s landmark decision in New York Times v. United States, examining prior restraints on the press, we can see that along with the per curiam opinion, the justices authored six separate concurrences…
Generating Predictions for Grants Pass v. Johnson
The philosopher Archimedes once wrote “Give me a lever that is long enough and a fulcrum to place it on and I will move the world.” Is there a metaphor for the Court within this quote and if so do certain justices control a lever? In fact, we may find that the control or the…
The Most Harmony at the Beginning of a Term in the Modern Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has heard somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-70 oral arguments per term since Justice Kavanaugh joined the Court in the 2018 term. This is well more than 100 fewer arguments than the Court heard at the highest point of arguments per term around the first few decades of the 1900’s. That time…
Charting the Justices Decisions Cutting Across Ideological Lines
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…
Empirical SCOTUS 