Opinions Authored
Published by Kedar December 8th, 2007 in Court Procedure, Oral Arguments, Supreme CourtThe crazy kids over at SCOTUSwiki have compiled court data for the last 12 years here. After looking at a few of them, I was curious to see if the number of opinions authored by Justices would increase or decrease over time. I used the links of SCOTUSwiki up to 1995, but I had to use JSTOR to find Harvard Law Review articles from 1995 and 1994. Well, the answer wasn’t clear:
Justice Thomas has shown the only reasonable upward trend and Justice Breyer has shown only a marginal downward trend. Aside from those two, the rest of the Justices have been pretty consistent over the past 15 years. I might extend the analysis to include the 1980’s, but that analysis would be hazy because the overall number of opinions will be larger on account of the larger docket.
Well, you could normalize each year and then graph the result for more insightful information which could possibly eliminate the misleading effects of having more opinions because of a larger docket, etc.
I just discovered this blog… I expect to return to it quite often.