After the Court released its opinion in Perdue v. Kenny A. yesterday, there was only one case left from the October sitting: Salazar v. Buono. The only justice who hasn’t written a majority opinion from October is Justice Kennedy. Barring an incredibly surprising turn of events, Justice Kennedy will be writing the majority opinion in [...]

Most terms of the Supreme Court go by without much publicity. The court usually hands down only one or two cases notable to make the front page of the times and another case or two worthy of the business section. In some terms, however, the Court accepts more than its usual load of high-profile cases [...]

(Nearly) every majority opinion features a short introduction before it jumps into the standard I, II, III, IV, etc structure. Some Justices simply introduce the facts very briefly (Scalia), while others discuss the procedural history (Thomas), and others discuss the underlying issue in the case (Souter.) I took a look at all of the cases [...]

The use footnotes has been a topic of quiet conversation around the judiciary for some time now. One group of Judges and practitioners (and an even larger percentage of students) find them to be burdensome and often unnecessary. Others think they serve as useful guides and make opinions more readable. Footnotes largely come in two [...]

Once again, I’ve conjured up some charts marking how often each Justice spoke during oral arguments in the first half of the term. You can find a detailed look into my methodology here but to summarize, these numbers represent the number of times ‘JUSTICE ______’ is mentioned in the oral argument transcripts posted on the [...]

Justice Kennedy’s streak of being in the majority in 5-4 decisions has been snapped today with his dissenting vote (and opinion) in Ali v. Federal Bureau of Prisions. Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion and was joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg. Justice Kennedy penned a dissent that was joined [...]

Oral Arguments took place this morning in Boumediene v. Bush and its sister case, Al-Odah v. US. Because of the heightened interest in the case, the Supreme Court opted to expedite the delivery of the audio recording and it was broadcast on C-Span by 11:50EST, less than an hour after the arguments concluded. The arguments [...]

After finding the most talkative Justice, I was interested in finding the funniest Justice. According to my calculations, there were 51 total references to (Laughter.) in the court’s first two months of arguements. Here is the breakdown: Case JR JPS AS AK DS CT RBG SB SA COUNSEL TOTAL Washington 1 2 3 Tom F. [...]

Two months into the term, the Supreme Court has held oral arguments in 19 different cases. After reading a few of the transcripts, I thought it would be interesting to see which Justices spoke most often during oral arguments. I found transcripts from the usual place and I copied the text into TextMate. From there, [...]

The Petitioner’s Briefs have been submitted in Al-Odah v. US and Boumediene v. Bush, the two high-profile detainee cases that the court has accepted for review. Thanks to SCOTUSblog, everyone can access the Al-Odah briefs here (Al-Odah) and here (El-Banna) and the Boumediene brief here. I’ll use Al-Odah for the majority of my analysis but [...]