A Sunday morning article in the New York Times begins, “Last February, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sent his eight Supreme Court colleagues a confidential memo that radiated frustration and certainty [referring to the D.C. Circuit’s decision in the Donald Trump immunity case].” The article continues describing Roberts’ Feb. 22nd memo to the justices,…
Tag: Trump v. United States
Searching for the Best Opinions: Text Analyses from the 2023/2024 SCOTUS Term
When lawyers think about legal writing, they tend to focus on their submissions to courts. Some of my work shows that writing quality matters from trial courts on up. Lawyers aren’t the only court actors who care about their legal writing though. Lawrence Baum and others (including Judge Posner) have looked at judicial writings and…
When the Stars Don’t Align for Justices Kavanaugh and Roberts
In an almost declaratory manner as he singularly conveys on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts expounded in the majority opinion in Trump v. United States, “[t]his case is the first criminal prosecution in our Nation’s history of a former President for actions taken during his Presidency…Doing so requires careful assessment of the scope of…
Generating Predictions for Grants Pass v. Johnson
The philosopher Archimedes once wrote “Give me a lever that is long enough and a fulcrum to place it on and I will move the world.” Is there a metaphor for the Court within this quote and if so do certain justices control a lever? In fact, we may find that the control or the…
Empirical SCOTUS 