NPR: The slow-motion Supremes

The slow-motion Supremes

Here's a statistic that made me look twice. The number of signed opinions reached by the U.S. Supreme Court so far this term -- 71 -- is the fewest since 1866, according to a calculation by the folks over at SCOTUSblog.

Now that is a long time ago.

And according to two interesting postings at the blog, which looks daily at the workings of the Supreme Court, it seems next year might be even slower. That, author David Stras writes, is amazing when you consider the "extremely large caseloads in the lower courts."

Stras examines a specific problem created by this low workload -- put in laymen's terms, during certain times of the year, the Supremes realize that they haven't booked enough cases to hear, and so rush a larger number of cases to be heard in a relatively expedited timeframe. This, Stras argues, creates a problem, "... arguably leading to less thorough presentations by counsel. For small firms and solo practitioners especially, an expedited briefing schedule can be crushing in terms of workload."

Stras based his article on work done by Tom Goldstein, also at SCOTUSBlog: "Analysis: The State of the Court -- May 2007 -- Part I." The articles are a bit long (they are written by lawyers, after all), but are still very readable. And they are fascinating looks at how the court deals, or doesn't deal, with deciding which cases to hear.

1:36 PM ET | 05- 4-2007 | permalink

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