Sarah Sloan, a Columbia Law graduate who clerked for Justice Kagan (and Stevens), told her law school’s alumni magazine that she never thought she’d wind up at the Court until she was encouraged by professors and circuit judges who knew the path well. Her experience underscores how personal recommendations and faculty pipelines remain decisive, even in an…
Tag: news
The Real A.C.B.
[This previously ran on Legalytics Substack] Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, once celebrated as a stalwart conservative and a crowning achievement of the Trump presidency, now finds herself under fire from the very base that championed her confirmation. Her recent vote in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, where she sided with Chief…
Special Report: TikTok Supreme Court Arguments
Last week the Supreme Court listened to arguments on the constitutionality the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which would require TikTok to shut down unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells it by January 19, 2025, citing national security concerns. TikTok and its users argue that the law infringes on their First…
The Changing Face of Supreme Court Oral Arguments
Background Perhaps more than any other Supreme Court tradition, oral arguments have gone through significant changes over the years. The Supreme Court is as old as the nation even though the first oral arguments were not held until the 1790’s. While presently it may feel like oral argument practice and procedure are relatively static. There…
The Final Five? Trump’s Next Potential Nominees to the Supreme Court
Former President and current President Elect Donald Trump appointed 234 judges during his first term. Three of these were to the United States Supreme Court. This is quite unique on several levels. Only three presidents, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower had three or more confirmed nominees since 1950 (Eisenhower had five in two…
How the Newest Supreme Court Justices Compare. A Look at Each of Their Respective First Two Years on the Court
For 11 years between 1994 and 2005 there was no turnover in membership on the Supreme Court. There were four changes to the Court’s composition between 2005 and 2010 and then another four changes between 2017 and 2022. Of the four newest justices on the Court, three were appointed by President Trump and one by…
2023 Stat Review
Version: 1.1Released: July 1, 2024Citation: Feldman, A. & Truscott, J.S. (2024, July 1). Supreme Court 2023-2024 Stat Review (Version1.1). EmpiricalSCOTUS. Available at: https://empiricalscotus.com/Supplemental Data (.zip): HereUpdate Note (07/02/2024): Thank You to Josh Blackman for recognizing our miscoding of Campos-Chavez v. Garland. This and corresponding summary statistics have been updated. It feels like much longer than…
DELIA – From Empirical Data to an Operational Platform
This year’s SCOTUS term will have a huge impact on the practice of law, new litigation, and the data needed by the existing attorneys to present their cases. For example, the SEC v. Jarkesy decision upends the way the SEC (and potentially several other agencies) enforce their actions. The fall of Chevron with Loper Bright…
Moody v. NetChoice, LLC: New Dimensions of First Amendment Jurisprudence
As we all await the decision on Moody v NetChoice, we ran the oral argument and the transcript against our Optimized Legal Audio (OLA) platform to see what it ascertained about the justices’ leanings. The conclusions show possible surprises that appear consistent with our suppositions of votes in other cases yet to be decided. To…
The Most Harmony at the Beginning of a Term in the Modern Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has heard somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-70 oral arguments per term since Justice Kavanaugh joined the Court in the 2018 term. This is well more than 100 fewer arguments than the Court heard at the highest point of arguments per term around the first few decades of the 1900’s. That time…
Charting the Justices Decisions Cutting Across Ideological Lines
Supreme Court decisions come down to coalitions and are often predicated on the question of whether a justice can garner at least four additional other votes to support their position in a case. Sometimes these coalitions are easy to come by. The Court decides somewhere around 33% or more of its cases on average per…
Empirical SCOTUS 