The odds are stacked against attorneys seeking to have their cases heard by the Supreme Court. While attorneys working on cases accepted for review have a 50/50 chance of success on the merits, the average likelihood of a cert grant is around 1%. Certain attorneys though have a much higher success rate (also documented in…
Tag: Kannon Shanmugam
The Last Six Years of Oral Arguments in the Supreme Court
Supreme Court cases involve many moving parts. Attorneys working on briefs can total more than ten and from the briefs there is little available information to discern who put in the bulk of the effort. One key can be the counsel of record, although this is a tricky proxy. The Solicitor General, for instance, is…
Advocates that Drive the Justices’ Votes
Supreme Court scholars often debate the role of lawyers in Supreme Court decision making. For an attitudinalist, the justices’ preferences make all (or at least most of) the difference. According to this theory justices will often vote based on their preferred policy direction, which minimizes the role of advocacy. More recent studies show that such…
The Heightened Importance of the Federal Circuit
This term the Supreme Court will hear arguments in its 100th case decided below by the Federal Circuit. The Court’s recent grant of the case Kisor v. Wilkie for argument also marks the fourth case granted from the Federal Circuit this term. This is by no means a small fraction of the Court’s total caseload….
Follow the Experts: Framing Petitions for Cert
What do Supreme Court experts do differently in their cert petitions? Some insights in this post
Supreme Court All-Stars 2013-2017
Success in the Supreme Court is hard to define because it can be viewed in a variety of ways. Few attorneys have the opportunity to try cases there and even fewer argue multiple cases. Part of success therefore is simply getting a case or cases to the Court. Once the Court agrees to hear a…
Attorneys and Firms for the 2017 Term
The current term at the Supreme Court has been anything but ordinary. With two argued cases already ruled moot the justices are down to 61 argued cases for possible signed decisions. This would tie last term for the fewest signed decisions in the modern Court era. Not only are the cases few and far between,…
Slicing and Dicing the Court’s 2017 Oral Arguments
While the Supreme Court is lagging in releasing its decisions this term, the justices wrapped up hearing oral arguments almost a month ago. The justices heard 63 oral arguments between October 2017 and April 2018. Within that block of time many expectations were reaffirmed while several new paths were blazed. Aside from those who sit…
Not All Appeals Are Equal
Every year the lawyer research and ranking company Chambers & Partners (sometimes mentioned as C&P herein) puts out a list of top appellate lawyers and firms (in a previous post I looked at some of the listed firms’ cert performance). Chambers uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodology to come up with its various…
When Opposites Attract Ideology Falls to the Wayside
Lots of noise is made about partisan and ideological divides on the Supreme Court. There tends to be less hubbub surrounding instances when justices that traditionally divide ideologically, vote together. Such surprising coalitions formed in the majority and dissent for the Court’s decision in last week’s Patchak v. Zinke ruling. Although this decision was met with only…
A New Era in SCOTUS Textualism
Legal interpretation begins with a legal text. At least in theory it does. While in practice this is not always the case, textualism has become synonymous with conservatism in recent Court eras primarily due to Justice Scalia’s reliance on the language of statutory texts. In practice, a textualist approach is not limited by judicial ideology and…
Something to Talk About
Oral arguments have always been central to Supreme Court adjudication. In early Supreme Court practice oral arguments were the primary means by which the justices learned about cases. Currently, oral arguments convey less original information to the justices, but still are helpful tools for the justices to learn about dimensions in each case not brought out…
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