Legal News

A Portrait of the Current High Court Term . . . in March

By Ashby Jones

Over at NYT.com, former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse breaks down the current high court term, and comes up with some interesting findings.

Among Greenhouse’s findings: that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas don’t vote in lockstep with each other, and that the current court might not be as business-friendly as it’s been made out to seem.

Writes Greenhouse:

She asks: “What accounts for the topsy-turvy world of the Supreme Court's 2010-2011 term?”

It could simply be statistical aberration, she notes, adding that only about one-third of the court’s cases for the term have been decided.

Or it could be that the faultlines are shifting. For now, it’s too soon to know.

But the voting patterns are interesting. In eight of the nine cases that rendered a divided vote, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and/or Anthony Kennedy saw things the same way. (Greenhouse did not use Justice Elena Kagan’s votes in her analysis, given how often she’s been forced to sit out of cases as a result of her services as U.S. Solicitor General.

The chief justice has yet to cast a dissenting vote, and Justice Thomas has  so far yet to write a majority opinion.

And in “all of the last term, Justices Scalia and Thomas were on opposite sides only six times. Already this term, they have split in five cases.”

Is this, asks Greenhouse, a mere fluke? Or is it a sign of something larger? “Watch and wait,” she writes.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 24, 2011 (boomark / email).