The number of cases decided by the Supreme Court has plummeted over the past 50 years:
23 thoughts on “Raw data: Supreme Court cases per year”
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Cats, charts, and politics
Cats, charts, and politics
The number of cases decided by the Supreme Court has plummeted over the past 50 years:
Comments are closed.
Failure of imagination or running out of whole cloth?
More that the Court has taken increasing control over its own docket; time was, the Court had to take a lot of cases whether or not it wanted to, but various reforms and changes to custom have changed that over the past several decades.
The other thing is that the Court increasingly uses the "shadow" docket (basically, all decisions--from the meaningless quotidian sort of when an argument or briefing deadline will be scheduled, to the more troubling decisions as to what cert. petitions it will grant) to effectuate policy. The court gets vastly more cert. petitions than it could possibly ever entertain, so the decisions as to which ones it will take themselves send strong signals to the lower courts (and lower courts act on those decisions).
So, the Supremes pick and choose which cases to take, and focus more on ones that advance their agenda. Which is bad enough in a 5-4 (or 4-5) split court; with a 6-3 conservative majority (something that hasn't happened since a century ago, when the Court was striking down child labor laws and workplace protections on a bullshit "freedom of contract" theory), so we are in for a wild ride.
I read a piece once arguing that the Supreme Court's docket should be decided by a committee of Circuit Court judges, selected each year by lottery, this making it much harder for individual justices to advance an agenda.
Nice job if you can get it…
It could be that they feel obliged to spend more time on each case nowadays, instead of making a quick judgement and knocking a case off in the space of an afternoon.
Seems to me there should be fewer issues to settle as the years pass and precedents accumulate. And Congress is passing fewer bills, especially since Reagan, which appears to roughly coincide with the start of the dropoff.
I'd be curious to see what proportion of cases is accepted for review these days, as opposed to 50 years ago.
"Seems to me there should be fewer issues to settle as the years pass and precedents accumulate."
That is not at all how this works. If anything, there should be *more* issues to resolve, as the population and the economy grow, and the complexity of our society increases.
This puts me in mind of a Peanuts comic strip that I read many years ago (and cannot locate), where Linus (or perhaps Charlie Brown?) quotes some folk tale: also told about the holy man hodja Nasruddin. A king asked his opinion about what he should do to be a better king. The holy man advised him to sleep until noon so that he would have that much less time to afflict mankind.
This trend seems for the best, given that we have to go to trial with the Supreme Court we have and not the one we would wish for.
No, this is completely backwards. This isn't about the Court accomplishing less and less, it's about it picking and choosing and focusing on cases that most advance its agenda. I.e., the Court isn't less busy, it's _more_ busy, and (from the standpoint of somebody who strongly disagrees with a lot of what the 6 conservatives on the Court seem to believe) inflicting _more_ damage.
Clearly they are over-worked and we must
packexpand the court.Too busy attending Federalist Society "seminars" held in cushy expensive (for the rest of us) places.
With the current Court, fewer cases at least diminishes the harms they can do.
Unfortunately no. When the 5th circuit issues some outrageous ruling and the Supreme court declines to take the case, this is not diminished harm.
Far too much time to contemplate their navels and come up with idiotic solutions. Maybe we really don't need them.....
Given the current court's ideological perspective, the fewer cases the better...
See Coby Beck and aldoushickman above. ↑
What conservatives are doing is legislating from the bench with the most consequential cases while manipulating the process to its benefit to expand that power w/o taking more cases.
I'm not nearly as concerned with the decrease in quantity as I am with the decrease in quality.
+1
At the same time, the number of opinions and total pages of opinions have expanded tremendously.
Now that the court is a policy-making body rather than a tribunal used for sorting out administrative and procedural squabbles, the justices need more time for their weighty decisions.
I thought there could be a correlation in number of cases vs the Republican/Democratic split on the court. I'm totally wrong about that.
Wikipedia has a strange article where they list the composition of the court by the party affiliation of the appointing president for presidential inaugural years only. I tried to give the web address, but then my whole message got blown away.
I knew that the last time the majority on the court was appointed by Dems was 1969 (5/4). I didn't realize how quickly and completely the Republicans came to dominate the court. Wiki says that from 1977 to 2009 the ratio was (2/7) except for 1993 when it was 1/8. McConnell's embargo spoiled our only chance in generations to get a majority on the court.
Anyway, maybe if we could find data on the level of Supreme Court corruption, we'd find a correlation.
Flexible hours. No heavy lifting. Noice!
Snarky reply: Thank God!
More nuanced: They're taking a greater proportion of highly-divisive cases involving social and political issues, which take longer to draft opinions (and dissents and concurrences) AND they're exponentially busier than they have ever been deciding those same sorts of cases (without oral argument and usually without opinions) on the shadow docket, which doesn't factor in to this statistic.