DailyWrit

The 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 […]

I’ve updated the speaking statistics to reflect this month’s oral arguments. You can find a rough sketch of my methodology on speaking here and on laughter here. You can click on the images to see a larger version. You can find my data here (Numbers required.)
Speaking (pdf):

Laughter (pdf):

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.

0

Gall

1

2
3

Kimbrough

1

1

2

Torres
3

1

4

Santos

1

1

Watson

1
1

1

3

Stoneridge

1

1

Medellin

1
1

1

3

Klein

0

Ali

1

1

Williams

1

1

1
3

Logan

0

Danforth
1
2
3

6

CSX

2

1

3

Davis
2
1
1

1

1

6

John R.
1
1
1

1
4

Fed. Ex.

4

1
5

Hall

1
1

1
3

TOTAL
8
6
17
2
4
0
0
5
1
8
51

No surprises here. Scalia talks almost twice as much as everyone else. […]

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, I […]

During oral arguments in Gall v. US two weeks ago, the court discussed whether sentences that fell within guidelines are presumed to be reasonable. My earlier analysis of the case can be found here.
Justice Thomas has been a long-time critic of Judges who speak out during oral arguments only to argue with their colleagues. […]