The current Supreme Court is unabashedly friendly towards big business. How friendly? If the Court’s trajectory continues, perhaps as friendly as any Court dating back to the Lochner-era where laissez-faire policies exuded from the Court’s rulings. Prominent scholars, most notably Epstein, Landes, and Posner found empirical support for the proposition that the current Court is more pro-business…
Tag: Impressions Products v. Lexmark
A New Way of Defining Oral Argument Terrain
Oral arguments are one of the more empirically studied areas of Supreme Court decision making. This may make intuitive sense. Oral arguments are one of the few moments where the justices’ decision making process transpires before members of the public. Audio of these arguments is recorded and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Video…well…
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…
The Final Stretch: Cases from the Last Two Months of Supreme Court Oral Arguments
Two months of oral arguments remain on the Supreme Court’s calendar. That equates to twenty-four arguments with eleven in March and thirteen in April (some with consolidated cases). The Court usually saves some of the most publicly recognized cases for the end of the term. Last year in March and April the Court took up…