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: Supreme Court
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…
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…
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…
Concurrences Are All the Rage
Concurrences have played an increasingly important role in Supreme Court decision-making over time. They are nothing new though. Looking as far back as 1971’s landmark decision in New York Times v. United States, examining prior restraints on the press, we can see that along with the per curiam opinion, the justices authored six separate concurrences…
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…
Are the Justices Still Party Players
All Article III federal judgeships start at the same place — with a presidential nomination. This procedure played a large role in the first several decades of statistical studies of judicial behavior, where researchers found that the party of appointing president was a strong predictor of judicial votes. While not looked at as frequently anymore,…
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…
Empirical SCOTUS 