James Daily of Skopos Labs and I filed an amicus brief in Google v. Oracle today with the help of Elie Herman of Wilson Elser. We take a unique approach of looking at what would happen if Supreme Court Justices were limited in the language they use in opinions as a comparison for what could…
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Where the Top Democratic Candidates Stand on the Supreme Court
[Wordcloud from the 3rd Democratic Debate Transcript] Here is a look at which Democratic candidates are on top of the polls from Real Clear Politics. The top candidates plans for the Supreme Court and other federal courts are described below. Biden: Plans to Keep the Supreme Court as is. No mention of plan for courts on main…
SCOTUSBlog Stat Pack 2018
In case you haven’t had a chance yet to take a look, our final SCOTUSBlog Stat Pack for the term is complete with 46 pages of data and analyses. I provide some brief commentary at the beginning and I’ll have a follow up post looking at some of these statistics in historical context in the…
With a Little Help from Academic Scholarship
Judges’ citations tell a lot about their dispositions. We can glean relationships between cases, judges’ perspectives on these cases, and judges’ relationships with other judges based on case citations. For this reason, empirical scholars have spent much time and energy analyzing judges’ citation patterns. A slew of Supreme Court researchers have written fascinating pieces about…
State Fault Lines That Might Lead to Big Cases Before the Supreme Court
The Court currently has 43 arguments scheduled for this term. For the most part, these cases will go under the radar. Even cases with large sets of amicus briefs, usually a good sign of generalized interest in cases, do not contain the same blockbuster quality as cases in recent terms. For example, amici filed nearly…
Out of Steam or Out of Time
For those following the Supreme Court, the notion that the Court is moving slowly this term has already been reiterated multiple times. The first clear notion of the Court’s historically slow pace came with the timing of the Court’s second signed decision which was the modern Court’s latest second opinion released in a term. Other analyses…
Decisions, Decisions
The other day Mark Sherman of AP reported an interesting statistic via Twitter (Kimberly Robinson mentioned this stat in Bloomberg Big Law Business post as well): this term would be the Court’s slowest in recent years for releasing the first two orally argued decisions. I decided to examine the details behind this statistic, which I provide…
The Court’s Most Cited Decisions of 2016
One trope that was often repeated this past Supreme Court term was that the Court did not take on a particularly exciting caseload. Evidence for this comes in the form of the unprecedented level of agreement among the justices compounded by the eight justice composition for most of the term that wished to avoid 4-4…
SCOTUS Success 2016
Now that the Supreme Court term is over, let the scoring begin. While this post looks at the most successful firms, litigators, and groups before the Supreme Court during the 2016 term, there are several caveats to note. First, this post looks at success before the Court as measured by win counts. Second, getting to…
SCOTUS Opinion Stats: 6/5/2017
This week Justice Gorsuch participated in three of the five opinions – Kokesh, Honeycutt, and Laroe. He has yet to write an opinion. Justice Kagan once again has the lengthiest decision with the majority in Advocate Health. Advocate was also the only decision with a separate opinion as Justice Sotomayor wrote a concurrence. Links to the…
SCOTUS Opinion Stats: 5/30/2017
Empirical SCOTUS has analytics from today’s opinions (May 30, 2017). These are organized a bit differently from last week’s results. We’ve included a measure for opinion readability using the Gunning Fog Index (lower scores tend to equate to easier reading). The most frequent words in each majority opinion are also provided. The Court release four…
Opinion Stats: Cooper v. Harris and Word Count Comparison for 5/22/2017
Cooper v. Harris Opinion Oral Argument Kagan Majority Sentences 718 Words 9826 Characters 49263 Syllables 15499 Polysyllables 1632 Words per sentence 13.685 Syllables per sentence 21.586 Syllables per word 1.577 Thomas Concurrence Sentences 20 Words 262 Characters 1246 Syllables 384 Polysyllables 43 Words per sentence 13.1 Syllables per sentence 19.2 Syllables per word 1.466 Alito…
Empirical SCOTUS 