The market for legal news and analysis has expanded as quickly as any other and, to help you out, I’ve compiled a list of useful, interesting, and entertaining twitter-ers. For those of you who hate twitter, don’t forget that each of these pages has an RSS feed that you can add to your reader of choice.

The News Feeds:
These feeds mainly post links to articles from their affiliated sources. Not much more explanation needed.
@ap_courtside – A feed run by AP Supreme Court reporters Jesse J. Holland and Mike Sherman.
@fedsoc – The Federalist Society’s twitter feed that features links to a variety of news sources. Would our founders have envisioned twitter?
@acslaw – An interesting feed from the American Constitution Society, the left’s response to the Fed. Soc.
@atlblog – ATL’s main feed that features some original content but mostly links to freshly-minted ATL articles.
@legal_times – The Legal Times’ feed includes almost exclusively links to LT and NLJ articles.
@volokhc – This feed is only populated with links to VC posts.

The Personalities:
@scotusblog – The internet’s premier Supreme Court news blog recently revamped their twitter feed to provide some interesting and insightful commentary from the key contributors to the blog. Their secondary feed, @scotusblogposts, provides an RSS-style list of their posts.
@tonymauro – The National Law Journal’s veteran Supreme Court reporter posts on this feed with surprising frequency, although many of his tweets are simply links to his articles.
@jessbravin – Jess Bravin is the Supreme Court reporter for the WSJ. He posts quite a bit of off-beat legal news to his feed.
@joanbiskupic – Biskupic is the USA Today’s veteran Supreme Court reporter.
@lawrencehurley – Hurley reports on the Supreme Court for the the LA Daily Journal and he typically posts a variety of articles to his twitter.
@cbsandrewcohen – CBS’s legal correspondent tweets about a variety of issues at the Supreme Court and retweets interesting article from different sources.
@ninatotenberg- NPR’s chief legal correspondence.
@davidlat – Above the Law’s founder and managing editor (and Fed Soc. socialite) David Lat posts some interesting commentary on his twitter and, thankfully, most of it isn’t law-related.
@kashhill – Another ATL personality, Kashmir Hill is an editor and joined the team a few years ago.
@ElieNYC – Yawn. You all should know Elie Mystal from ATL by now and if you don’t, you won’t care much about his feed.

The Funnies:
@notspitter – An anonymous Michigan 1L (supposedly) started this twitter account that chronicles the life of an uber(faux)gunner. My favorite recent tweet: “Dear Classmates: If I want to hear what “you think,” I will read your law review note when it’s published.” If I could recommend any twitter-er on this list, @notspitter would be the one.
@scalia – Well, a person purports to be Justice Scalia. Very similar in concept to Fake Steve.
@smsotomayor – Similar to @Scalia, except this is fake Sotomayor’s feed.

The Most Important:
@DailyWrit – In many ways, I am surprised that @aplusk is beating me. Weird, huh?
@kedarbhatia – Me.

If you can think of any other good ones that I’ve forgotten, post them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.

Today, February 22, 2010, marks the four-year anniversary of the last time Justice Thomas asked a question during oral arguments. His silence from the bench is well-document and has been discussed by commentators (including myself) quite a bit. Today, Tony Mauro has a few interesting tidbits to add in his article in the NLJ.

I should also note that the Supreme Court typically releases a handful of cases in the week following its February recess. In some years, the number is as high as five and in others it is as low as two. I have an impressively negative track record with predictions, but I’ll try again with this minor one: I say the Court will release three on Tuesday, 2/23 and two on Wednesday, 2/24.

I should let everyone know that I am currently leading in Fantasy SCOTUS league. Thank you.

UPDATE February 10, 2010: I am still winning and the image has been updated to show the latest scoreboard

The Court has been criticized for releasing only four opinion going into the winter break and Linda Greenhouse even suggested that internal wrangling over Citizens United may have “sucked the air out of the term.” Maybe so, but the Court has done nothing publicly to suggest that this term is progressing differently from any other. In fact, last year, the Court had only released two substantive opinions in argued cases and DIG’ed another. In OT07, the Court had released five opinions going into the winter break. In OT06, the Court had released four opinions and DIG’ed one case. To recap, here are the number of decisions on argued cases:

The Roberts Court’s trend towards releasing opinions late in the term is well-documented and commentators should not be surprised to see only four opinions heading into the winter break. The biggest counter to this argument is the fact that the Roberts Court has been making an effort to load the docket with cases during the first few months in an effort to soften the inevitable end-of-term rush to finish opinions. I’m not sure packing cases early would have a huge impact on decisions being released before Christmas although I do think there could be an increasingly large number of opinions released during February and March.

With all of that in mind though, Citizens United should be considered late. Capitol Hill is waiting for the decision and campaigns around the country are treading lightly in anticipation of the option. The Supreme Court’s delay will only extend the period of uncertainty.

The Supreme Court handed down only orders this morning, meaning the next possible time for it to release an opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is early next year.

Several commentators, most notably John Elwood on Volokh Conspiracy and Tony Mauro for the Legal Times, have considered the possible reasons and consequences of the Court’s rather delinquent decision. earlier this year I took a look at the cases from OT07 that took longer-than-expected and the stats generally support what the pundits have said. The average number of days for an opinion is about 92. The longest opinions from OT07 were 202 and 232 days, respectively. US v. Williams took 202 days, split 7-2, and had three opinions. US v. Santos took 232 days, split 5-4, and had four opinions.

The case with the greatest number of opinions was Department of Revenue of KY v. Davis. It took 197 days, split 7-2, and had seven opinions (Souter(m), Stevens(c), Roberts(c), Scalia(c), Thomas(c), Kennedy(d), Alito(d)).

On the other hand, McConnell v. FEC took about 92 days, split 5-2, and had three majority opinions, three concurrences, and two dissenting opinions. Notably, the decision in McConnell was released on December 10, 2007, relatively early in the year for an opinion and not even on the last day for opinions before the break (another opinion was released on December 15)!

In my opinions, the number suggest that the Citizens United decision will be as far reaching as people expect but I think there will be far less division than the McConnell opinions. The Court could probably churn out an opinion in a week if each of the Justices was to simply write an opinion for himself or herself and the Court issue nine opinions. In an effort to fulfill some of his nomination pledges, the Chief Justice may be placing a greater emphasis on writing a majority opinion (that I expect he will write) that can drag along a majority for the crux of his argument.

The Oyez Project has released audio from oral arguments for each of the cases from the last term.

The Court sat for its traditional “class photo” yesterday, to the apparent amusement of less than half the members of the current Court.

You can also find a video taken at the loosely termed “photo shoot” here. I should note that the Court released a few different photos from the shoot and in all of them, Justice Alito looks determined to avoid having his soul captured by the liberal photograph-making devices being pointed at him.

Supreme Court class photos have a tradition of capturing bizarre moments. One of my favorites is the class photo from 1986, taken after Chief Justice Rehnquist’s promotion and Justice Scalia’s arrival on the bench. Thurgood Marshall gives the camera his best smile, but he seems surprised to still be on the court.

Another all-time favorite is this below, taken in 1925. Note that the two Justices standing on the left, Justices Stanford and Sutherland, look nearly identical. The Justices standing on the right also look like they could be related.

The Supreme Court released its orders list from its long-conference yesterday and among the 12 cases granted is a potentially landmark ruling on the Second Amendment.

The Court granted review in McDonald v. City of Chicago, a case decided by the Seventh Circuit in early-June. SCOTUSblog has a collection of cert. stage briefs that you can access here and David Kopel has an intersting collection of background reading available on Volokh Conspiracy here. Notably, well-regarded conservative judges Frank Easterbrok and Richard Posner both ruled against incorporation in this case.

Well, I made a mistake yesterday. Relying on the WSJ Law Blog’s onsite observer, I reported that General Kagan had worn a blue pants suit. I was wrong.

In fact, the Washington Post and Above the Law are now reporting that General Kagan chose a black suit with a light blue blouse with which to disgrace the Office of the Solicitor General. ATL confirmed the choice of attire with General Kagan herself but was unable to get her to confess her choice of designer.

According to the Post, the DOJ official policy still requires men to wear the morning coat but now makes the traditional attire optional for women.

For all the trivia nerds out there, I forgot to mention two important, but oft-unmentioned facts about yesterday’s argument.

General Kagan opted not to wear the traditional grey morning coat that male Solicitors General wear. Instead, according to the WSJ Law Blog, she wore a blue pants suit. Of course, the writing was on the wall.

Additionally, the the formal collar worn by Sotomayor and gifted to her by Justice Ginsburg, is called a jabot (pronounced zha-BO). In their recent interviews with C-SPAN, both Justice Ginsburg and Justice O’Connor expressed a lot of frustration at their initial difficulty in obtaining proper judicial couture, so I suspect this gift was much more meaningful than we would typically assume.

I mentioned some of this stuff on the DailyWrit’s Twitter, but I’m getting a little lazy about posting these factoids with all deliberate speed. My apologies.