One of the more difficult questions facing Supreme Court scholars is trying to decipher the impact of the litigants. Given the secrecy with which the Supreme Court conducts the majority of its business, any effort towards understanding the decision making process is inevitably met with frustration. The most recent insight we have into any of…
Tag: Moore v. Texas
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…
Highly Citable
Attorneys before the Supreme Court have multiple goals. Whether the ultimate goal is winning a case, affecting public policy, or testing the constitutionality of a piece of legislation, good counsel get the justices’ attention. How they get the justices’ attention varies. Some engender attention through their regular experience before the Court while others through the…
The Most Important Cases Already Argued This Term in SCOTUS
Over the last few years the Supreme Court has heard multiple landmark cases. The issues in these cases ranged from abortion to marriage equality and from affirmative action in schools to national healthcare. So far this Term the Court has not heard cases of the same magnitude. While cases like Beckles v. United States may…
Four Takeaways From this Term’s 2016 SCOTUS Oral Arguments
We are experiencing a changing of the guard in the Supreme Court. There has been an usually long period with an eight-Justice dynamic which will very possibly continue on through the end of the Court’s current Term. Without some unprecedented occurrence, President-Elect Trump will nominate the next Justice to the Supreme Court who will likely…
Forced Judicial Restraint
When, soon after his nomination to the Supreme Court, Judge Garland was praised for his judicial restraint, this praise was not envisioned for the type of impact Judge Garland’s nomination has made on the Court so far. Similarly, no one calling for judicial restraint or decrying the Court’s judicial activism prior to 2016 expected change to come in…
Bringing in the Big Guns
In a cautious and almost trepidatious manner the Supreme Court has slowly filled in part of its docket for the 2016 Term. The correlation between this slow-moving approach to cert and the empty seat on the Court is unmistakable. There are currently eight cases scheduled for argument in October. The Court already granted cert in…
The Lucky Ones: Cert Grants 2016
Sixteen. That is the number of cases that the Supreme Court is currently slated to hear in the 2016 Term. This number in itself is exceptionally low for this time of year, although in terms of absolute case grants it is not exponentially far behind years past (see below). For those who follow the Supreme…
A Growing Fracture in the Death Penalty
Under Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court has revisited the issue of capital punishment on numerous occasions. Just in terms of overall cases, the Court has ruled on 23 since the beginning of the 2005 Term (habeas cases where the Court granted cert and ruled on the merits simultaneously are excluded from this count). These…
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