Each October before the Supreme Court begins its term, the justices meet for the “long conference” to review the Court’s agenda. The justice held this conference for the upcoming term two days ago on September 25th. During this conference the justices meet to discuss petitions to the Court for the upcoming term. This is the…
Top Firms’ Supreme Court Business: Some Stay Close While Others Stay Away
Multiple services annually rank law firms along several dimensions and according to various measures. Even with these rankings there is little objective gauge of a firm’s quality and rightfully so. There are many aspects that go into a firm’s relative quality and some are easier to gauge than others. One thing that these rankings almost…
A Primer on The Government’s Participation Before the Supreme Court at the Start of the 2017 Term
On the Merits The most prolific player before the Supreme Court, the federal government through the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), should have its hands full this year. As is often the case, the OSG is involved in a large portion of the term’s first set cases. Even before the term begins though the…
Law Schools, Judges, and Government Attorneys
This post extends beyond the Supreme Court to look at which law schools have been most successful placing current government attorneys and sitting federal judges around the nation (thank you Jack Metzler / @SCOTUSplaces for the idea). The positions examined include United States Attorneys, sitting federal judges, and state attorney generals and solicitor generals (AGs,…
The Court’s Recent Lack of Support for the Federal Government’s Agenda
This is the first of a series of two posts examining the federal government’s litigation in the Supreme Court. While this post looks at the last several terms of government litigation, the next will analyze the government’s upcoming cases. The federal government, through the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), is the most frequent…
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…
Crunching Data From this Past Term
It has been almost two months since the completion of the Supreme Court’s 2016 term. Scholars and analysts have pored over Court’s decisions. SCOTUSBlog released its Stat Pack which contains many interesting statistical trends and details from the term. Each term, a group of professors now organized through the Washington University in St. Louis School of…
Loud Voices From Below
The Supreme Court only takes a small fraction of cases petitioned to it every year and there is no perfect formula for ensuring a case makes its way to the Court. There are, however, several signals that can help a case along the way. Much of what matters has to do with uniformity in case…
An Uphill Battle for the Court’s Liberals
“[I]f a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law, the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs…
A Matter of Life and Death
The Supreme Court may be on summer recess but that doesn’t mean the justices are free from work-related obligations. Throughout the year some of the most significant decisions the justices make are performed unilaterally. The justices are each assigned to a certain geographic region associated with a judicial circuit or circuits and by virtue of…
Will the Trump Administration Receive Another Legal Blow When The Court Decides on the Travel Ban’s Constitutionality?
The Supreme Court already agreed to hear many significant cases in the fall 2017 term. Among these is one of the most important tests of executive power the Court has ever heard. This case, consolidated as Trump. v. International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), involves the administration’s travel ban – specifically Executive Order No. 13780 –…
A Changing of the Guard? (Probably Not But the Evidence is Mixed)
In an article I wrote last year I found several Supreme Court repeat players were much more successful than others in getting the Supreme Court to hear their cases. Many of these “Elite Cert Attorneys” argue multiple cases each term before the justices. They all have high exposure to all aspects of Supreme Court process and…
Empirical SCOTUS 