I stumbled upon a speech given by Justice Ginsburg on March 23, 2009 on the “Lighter Side of Life at the Supreme Court.” Its a pretty interesting read and, thankfully, a short one. She mentions a handful of fairly funny anecdotes about the Court, including this excerpt from her husband’s proposed canned responses to letters:
Favorite [...]

Justice Ginsburg gave a speech recently at the Second Circuit Judicial Conference in New York. Justice Ginsburg serves as the Justice assigned to that circuit right now and that role was put in prominent view when she issued a temporary injunction last week to block Chrysler’s takeover by Fiat for a day.
Her speech can be [...]

With 43 opinions released, the Court has now released just over half of the opinions it will release for the term. Lets take a look at some of the statistics.
Number of Opinions: 43 cases
Per Curiam: 7 cases (16%)
9-0: 19 cases (44%)
8-1: 1 case (2%)
7-2: 4 cases (9%)
6-3: 5 cases (12%)
5-4: 7 cases (16%)
I read this [...]

The Supreme Court will sit again on Monday morning for the February sitting and will likey release several opinions. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the Court has released 5-6 opinions in the first week of its February sitting over the last few years, and we have no reason to assume they won’t release [...]

Justice Ginsburg appears to be doing well after her surgery last week. The Court released the following press release:
The pancreatic cancer for which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had surgery on February 5 has been determined as TNM Stage 1 by doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. All lymph nodes proved [...]

The Supreme Court is reporting that Justice Ginsburg has undergone surgery for cancer and is expected to remain in the hospital for 7-10 days.

(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 [...]

The Supreme Court handed down an opinion today in Altria Group v. Good (opinion here) which will likely open the door for state-level suits against false advertising by cigarette companies.
Justice Stevens penned the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. Justice Thomas filed a dissenting opinion that was joined by [...]

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 [...]