The Court has been criticized for releasing only four opinion going into the winter break and Linda Greenhouse even suggested that internal wrangling over Citizens United may have “sucked the air out of the term.” Maybe so, but the Court has done nothing publicly to suggest that this term is progressing differently from any other. [...]

The Supreme Court handed down only orders this morning, meaning the next possible time for it to release an opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is early next year.
Several commentators, most notably John Elwood on Volokh Conspiracy and Tony Mauro for the Legal Times, have considered the possible reasons and consequences of the [...]

When Chief Justice Roberts first sat on the Court on October 3, 2005 in IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez, he spoke twenty-four times and his first question appeared on page 15 of the transcript. Following that question, he went back and forth with Carter Phillips, a man with whom the Chief Justice was already acquainted, for [...]

This weekend, I went through all the oral argument transcripts from OT00 through OTO8 and I counted how many times each of the major advocates has argued before the Supreme Court. I know that I’ve got all of the big advocates (10+ arguments), but I might be missing a few of the advocates with less. [...]

My goal was to publish the final term statistics today, but because the Court will hear rearguments in Citzens United and likely issue an opinion before the beginning of OT09, I’ll have to update these statistics again in September.
I’ve updated the 2008 Term Case Index, which you can always find at the top of the [...]

I’ve compiled a really interesting list featuring the win-loss record of every advocate from the SG’s office and all of the top private advocates. The list is necessarily incomplete but I wanted to give everyone sample of it before I publish the final version tomorrow afternoon when the remaining cases come out.
You can [...]

I’ve updated the Term Case Index and the Term Count Spreadsheet.
With the release of three opinions today, the Court now has only seven cases left to decide. It will hand down some on Thursday and the final opinions next Monday. Of the remaining cases, the two attracting the most media attention are Safford Unified School [...]

The Supreme Court released four divided opinions today including a very interesting case rejecting an inmate’s right to test the DNA used to convict him more than 15 years ago.
Justice Thomas was the author of another 5-4 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services. For some reason, I had always assumed that he filed a [...]

The news coming out of the Supreme Court is mostly quiet now, as Justices and clerks plow though opinions and the rest of the world speculates about Justice Souter’s replacement. On that note, Jan Crawford Greenburg has a post on her blog here confirming three of the six members of what she claims is the [...]

Andrew Frey’s biography on the Mayer Brown website says “He has argued 64 cases in the US Supreme Court, more than any other lawyer currently in private practice.”
Well, Carter Phillips of Sidley Austin has been creeping up for some time now and finally beat him when he argued for the respondents in Gross v. [...]