[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…
Tag: scotus
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…
What Oral Argument Engagement Tells Us About Supreme Court Opinion Writing
Between the 2004 and 2019 Supreme Court Terms, Justice Thomas spoke in five oral arguments for a total of fewer than 200 words. In that window of time he chose not to speak in over 1,100 arguments. In that same timeframe, Justice Breyer spoke over 320,000 words at oral argument. During those same years, Justice…
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…
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…
The Circuit Barrage: The Justices’ Divergent Votes Based on Lower Courts
Introduction While few people would argue against the proposition that the Supreme Court Justices are some of the most intelligent legal luminaries in the United States, these luminaries often rule in opposing directions. The number of the Court’s split decisions often outnumber the number of unanimous decisions. During the 2021 Term, the number of 6-3…
Measuring Oral Arguments in the 2023/2024 Term
Some things from this year’s oral arguments are clear. We know for instance, who is talking more and less. These intricacies follow from what we saw last term. Justice Jackson is the most active justice in arguments. Thomas is the least. There are several aspects of oral argument that are below this playing field surface….
Empirical SCOTUS 