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The Most Harmony at the Beginning of a Term that Most of Us Have Ever Seen

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 period overlapped with the Court moving from predominately unanimously decided cases to…

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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 term by unanimous 9-0 votes.  The number of unanimous votes diminishes though as…

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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 party of appointing president still yields…

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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 splits alone outnumbered the number of…

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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. When are the justices engaged? Which justices interact with one another…

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What’s the Holdup in OT 2023?

Last term was supposed to be different. The Court faced the leak of the Dobbs draft opinion in May of 2022 and all signs pointed at that point to the Court’s officers expending effort to attempt to prevent such an instance from recurring. This effort in deterrence potentially slowed the decision release process for the 2022 Supreme Court term which started in October of the same year.  The Court…

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The Echo Chamber Grows

A seemingly innocuous Supreme Court case in 2017 looking at the narrow issue of time bars in class action lawsuits saw two giants of Supreme Court advocacy duke it out before the nine justices. California Public Employees’ Retirement System v. ANZ Securities pit Tom Goldstein of then-named Goldstein and Russell for the Petitioner CALPERS against Paul Clement, then of Kirkland & Ellis, who argued…

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Passing the Oral Argument Torch

What seemed like an innocuous comment during oral arguments on October 3rd, 1994 by Richard Seamon, attorney for the Department of Justice in the case of United States v. Shabani led to lengthy retort. Seamon, prepared to end the arguments stated, “Unless the Court has further questions, I have nothing further.”  Justice Breyer in his first oral argument had yet to speak at the 42-minute marker…

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And We’re Off to the Races

If you feel like the 2022 Supreme Court Term just ended you are not alone. The justices began this term much like where they left off in June 2023 —  with the October argument session of the 2023 Term now complete and six oral arguments already under the justices’ belts we are seeing similar variation in their oral argument engagement to we had last year.  Once again, Justice Jackson is far ahead…

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Taking the Fifth

There are several things that are true about the Fifth Circuit. This includes the six cases from the Fifth Circuit that are already granted for argument before the Supreme Court this term, the most from any circuit so far.  It also includes the six judges that former President Trump appointed to the Circuit.  Then there is the speculative. Some argue that the Fifth Circuit is the most…

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Citing Down the Ladder

One of if not the most well-known sentences from a Supreme Court opinion comes in the form of John Marshall’s line in Marbury v. Madison, “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.”  This short sentence signified a power grab whereby the Supreme Court took on judicial review and consequently the ability to declare statutes unconstitutional.  An extended…

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Two Pieces to the Puzzle: Long Conference Petitions and Granted Cases for OT 2023

[completed with the help of Jake Truscott who gathered data for this post] The 2022 Supreme Court term concluded this past June. Since then, the Justices have been on break. In the past several justices go on vacation (some of the downsides to such travel have been documented as well) while others teach in exciting locations in and outside of the U.S.  This summer it appears that the justices…

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I'm Still Standing

What ingredients come to mind when you think of cases before the Supreme Court? One might opine controversial issues or high stakes litigation. At a case level one might say circuit splits or elite attorneys. Still, there are more elementary components of litigation mentioned in Article III and they start with a case or controversy.  Central to this concept is standing – that a plaintiff suffered…

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Supreme Court Justice Power Index at the End of the 2022 Term

Who is the powerful Supreme Court Justice on the current Court? This question, while interesting to think about, leads to several subsequent questions, primarily to do with what is meant by “powerful.” The vagueness with which we define power leads to a near impossibility in coming up with a legitimate and valid answer.  Other studies have tried to define the greatest justice, a similarly vague…

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Where We Are at the End of the Supreme Court's 2022 Term

Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion on social media and in the press regarding inferences we can make from data on Supreme Court Justices’ behavior. One critique raised was that levels of unanimity do not show that the Court is necessarily moving to the left or to the right as a unit because we are not privy to information related to case selection in most instances (sometimes we…

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Another One Bites the Dust: End of 2022/2023 Supreme Court Term Statistics

[This piece was co-authored by Jake Truscott, a Post-Doctoral Researcher for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement] It has been another crazy year before the Supreme Court as the justices took up important cases related to Affirmative Action, student debt, voting, and religious rights among other issues. The justices decided several of these important cases along ideological lines.  This direction…

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The Highest Cites in the Land

The Supreme Court is known as the “Highest Court in the Land,” but even this highest court needs to justify its choices.  Scholar Martin Shapiro referred to this universal judicial norm as part of the logic of the triad.  Under this logic, judges maintain a system of trust with the public by providing seemingly neutral support for their decisions.  This is why disseminating opinions to the people…