DailyWrit

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role clerks play and how they influence the way cases are accepted and decided. Obviously they play a huge role in Cert. Pool (which Justices Stevens and Alito forgo) as well as writing the opinions once they are ready to be distributed.
In today’s order’s list (here), […]

Audio files from the October Term 2007 are now online over at Oyez. You can find them here.
Recommended listens: Announcement of Boumediene v. Bush and Oral Arguments in Danforth v. Minnesota.

There is a fascinating fight going on behind the scenes of a case about to reach the Supreme Court. The argument more or less boils down to whether a local attorney who has been with a case for a decade or an experience Supreme Court advocate fresh to the case should argue in front of […]

Apparently I’m late on this, but Adam Liptak at the New York Times reports that Justice Alito has opted out of the Cert. Pool. The Cert. Pool is a system in which Justices pool together their clerks to review cert petitions more efficiently. One clerk will review petitions and draft a memo that is circulated […]

The Court last week decided to end months of speculation in Louisiana v. Kennedy when it struck down a motion for rehearing and simply issued a revised opinion. The move is not unprecedented but it is extremely unusual and done only in very specific circumstances. The modified opinion can be found here.
Justice Kennedy wrote an […]

The state of Louisiana and attorneys for Patrick Kennedy have filed petitions arguing whether or not the Court should rehear the landmark death penalty case as a result of research oversight. The original petition for rehearing can be found here. You can find the Petitioner’s brief in opposition of rehearing here, the Respondent’s brief in […]

A lawyer in Vancouver, Washington filed a complaint that weighed in a a whooping 465 pages. Defendants understandably upset and the Judge wasn’t too impressed by the lengthy complaint. He granted the motion and made his reasons very clear:
Not before page 30 does the Complaint address the facts alleged. Plaintiff’s allegations continue for 87 […]

I just finished the Term Index, which you can find here.
Number of Opinions Released: 72
Per Curiam Decisions: 5 (7%)
Unanimous Decisions (9-0, 8-0): 24 (33%)
Lone Dissenter(8-1):6 (8%) [Thomas(3), Ginsburg(2), Breyer(1)]
Two Dissenters (7-2, 6-2, 5-2) :19 (26%)
Three Dissenters(6-3, 5-3): 9 (13%)
Five-to-Four Decision: 9 (13%)
More to come as I have more time to crunch numbers.

The Term Case Index for OT07 is now representative of everything the Court has handed down thus far in the term. As always, you can find it either along the top of the page or here. When the court hands down the remaining three cases from the term, I’ll post a complete statistical breakdown similar […]

The next few weeks are sure to be busy ones on the Court. The Court has an astonishing 26 cases left on its docket and all of those will receive an opinion before the end of June. Last year the Court released 22 cases in the same period (second through fourth weeks in June.) The […]

The Supreme Court is expected to release a few opinions this week. Ordinarily, the Court has released between 3 and 5 opinions in the week following its last oral arguments.
The oldest case on the docket is Santos v. US and it was argued in early October. Department of Revenue v. Davis (November) and […]

On March 31, the Court accepted cert. in Pleasant Grove v. Summum. The case revolves around the right of aSummum group to erect a monument of the Seven Aphorisms in a City Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah that already has a similarly-sized monument to the Ten Commandments.
A park in Pleasant Grove, Utah features a […]

After a cursory glance of the opinion in Medellin v. Texas (here), it looks like the Court largely sidestepped one of the major questions in the case. The Court appears to have focused primarily on the international law portion of the debate at the demise of solving the federalist issue. President Bush had declared in […]

The Supreme Court heard three cases today, two in the morning and one in the afternoon. Hearing three cases in a day was a normal occurance back in the day (80s) but has now become a rather uncommon occurrence.
This is the first time this term that the Court has heard three cases in one […]

Medellin (docket, questions presented, oral arguments, petitioner’s brief) is without a doubt one of the most anticipated opinions of the year.
Medellin was argued on October 10, 2007, making it one of the oldest cases still being decided. As of today, it has been nearly 160 days since Medellin’s oral arguments and last year, the […]