Tony Mauro is reporting that Solicitor General may wait until next term to argue her first case before the Supreme Court. It had been reported earlier that she might argue for the first time in the landmark Voting Rights Act case, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder. Mauro is now reporting that Neal Katyal [...]

I was reading the court’s “Guide for Counsel in Cases to be Argued Before the Supreme Court of the United States” and I noticed a reference to a very recent case: For an excellent example of a counsel who was intimately familiar with her client’s business, see the transcript of argument in United States v. [...]

As we head into the April sitting, the court’s term is entering its home stretch. The court has already issued 43 opinions, well ahead of where it has been in the last few years. Opinions published going into April sitting: OT05 43 OT06 27 OT07 28 OT08 43 The reason for the increase in early [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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, [...]

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. [...]