All Article III federal judgeships start at the same place — with a presidential nomination. This procedure played a large role in the first several decades of statistical studies of judicial behavior, where researchers found that the party of appointing president was a strong predictor of judicial votes. While not looked at as frequently anymore,…
Category: justices
The Circuit Barrage: The Justices’ Divergent Votes Based on Lower Courts
Introduction While few people would argue against the proposition that the Supreme Court Justices are some of the most intelligent legal luminaries in the United States, these luminaries often rule in opposing directions. The number of the Court’s split decisions often outnumber the number of unanimous decisions. During the 2021 Term, the number of 6-3…
Measuring Oral Arguments in the 2023/2024 Term
Some things from this year’s oral arguments are clear. We know for instance, who is talking more and less. These intricacies follow from what we saw last term. Justice Jackson is the most active justice in arguments. Thomas is the least. There are several aspects of oral argument that are below this playing field surface….
What’s the Holdup in OT 2023?
Last term was supposed to be different. The Court faced the leak of the Dobbs draft opinion in May of 2022 and all signs pointed at that point to the Court’s officers expending effort to attempt to prevent such an instance from recurring. This effort in deterrence potentially slowed the decision release process for the…
O’Connor & The Court: Breaking the Supreme Court’s Glass Ceiling
By Adam Feldman and Jake Truscott The Supreme Court stood as a monolithic institution for almost its first two centuries with it’s all male (predominately white male) composition. Confirmed in 1981 as the nation’s 104th Supreme Court justice and its first female, Sandra Day O’Connor truly broke through the glass ceiling. From her many years…
Passing the Oral Argument Torch
What seemed like an innocuous comment during oral arguments on October 3rd, 1994 by Richard Seamon, attorney for the Department of Justice in the case of United States v. Shabani led to lengthy retort. Seamon, prepared to end the arguments stated, “Unless the Court has further questions, I have nothing further.” Justice Breyer in his…
Public Support for the Supreme Court Through the Lens of Political Science
Studies have historically highlighted longitudinal continuity in public support for the Supreme Court as an institution – even in the aftermath of particularly divisive decisions. These trends have eroded as of late, with Independents and Democratic-leaning voters increasingly likely to relay disapproval of the Court’s decision-making. This article serves to frame these developments in a…
The Supreme Court: Where Everyone Knows Your Name
At any level of legal jurisdiction, the American court system tends to operate as a system of working groups. That is, even as particular litigants and litigation are constantly changing, a core group of actors – i.e., judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys – tend to retain a consistent presence in the courtroom. The Supreme Court…
Supreme Court Justice Power Index at the End of the 2022 Term
Who is the powerful Supreme Court Justice on the current Court? This question, while interesting to think about, leads to several subsequent questions, primarily to do with what is meant by “powerful.” The vagueness with which we define power leads to a near impossibility in coming up with a legitimate and valid answer. Other studies…
Where We Are at the End of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Term
Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion on social media and in the press regarding inferences we can make from data on Supreme Court Justices’ behavior. One critique raised was that levels of unanimity do not show that the Court is necessarily moving to the left or to the right as a unit…
Another One Bites the Dust: End of 2022/2023 Supreme Court Term Statistics
[This piece was co-authored by Jake Truscott, a Post-Doctoral Researcher for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement] It has been another crazy year before the Supreme Court as the justices took up important cases related to Affirmative Action, student debt, voting, and religious rights among other issues. The justices decided several of these important cases along ideological…
A New Landscape Unfolds: Supreme Court Oral Arguments in the 2022-2023 Term
In a term marked by arguments flowing past their allotted times, the justices had quite a bit to say in the 2022-2023 oral argument sessions. Of course the justices could properly focus their energy on the paltry 59 cases for argument. That number is quite a far cry from 197 arguments the Court heard in…
Empirical SCOTUS 