Archive for the 'Oral Arguments' Category
Opinions Authored
1 Comment Published by Kedar December 8th, 2007 in Oral Arguments, Court Procedure, 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 […]
Updated Oral Argument Statistics
0 Comments Published by Kedar December 6th, 2007 in Oral Arguments, Court Procedure, Supreme CourtI’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):
Who Is The Funniest Justice?
3 Comments Published by Kedar November 10th, 2007 in Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Court Procedure, Stephen Breyer, Oral Arguments, David Souter, John Roberts, Supreme Court, Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Justices and JudgesAfter 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. […]
Which Justice Is The Most Talkative?
2 Comments Published by Kedar November 8th, 2007 in Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Court Procedure, Oral Arguments, Stephen Breyer, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Justices and Judges, Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Constitutional LawTwo 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 […]
Oh Antonin
0 Comments Published by Kedar October 19th, 2007 in Sentencing, Oral Arguments, Court Procedure, Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court, Constitutional LawDuring 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. […]
