Federal Judiciary

Latest Stat Pack | 6.26.10

By Akin Gump Supreme Court Practice Group

The most recently updated Stat Pack is now available here (as one file).  It covers decisions in all October Term 2009 cases as of the most recent release of opinions, on Thursday, June 24.  The separate charts in it are:

• The Court?s Workload in OT09
• Decided Cases by Final Vote
• Opinion Author by Sitting
• Frequency in the Majority
• Opinion Author v. Vote Split and Separate Opinion Authorship
• Justice Agreement (all cases, non-unanimous cases)
• Circuit Scorecard (circuits of origin, affirmance v. reversal rates)
• Grants Per Conference

We will include more charts in subsequent versions of the Stat Pack, which we will release later this Term.  For all of the blog?s statistics reports from OT95 onward, including our first five from OT09, please see our archives on SCOTUSwiki here.

We expect four more opinions from the Court this Term: in Bilski v. Kappos (patents), Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (separation of powers), McDonald v. Chicago (guns), and Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (right of association).

Below the jump are key take-aways from the Stat Pack, as well as a few points of comparison with past editions.

• There are eighty (80) decided merits cases thus far, and four (4) additional merits cases that were dismissed.  (We exclude Briscoe v. Virginia and Weyhrauch v. United States (because we do not regard them as having been decided on the merits) and Citizens United (an OT08 case).)  Of the eighty (80), sixty-eight (68) are in argued cases, two (2) are in cases decided before argument, and ten (10) are summary dispositions.
• Of the eighty (80) decided cases, thirty-eight (38) ? or forty-eight percent (48%) ? are unanimous, while only twelve (12) are five-four (5-4) splits.  The number of 5-4?s is likely to grow Monday.
• Chief Justice Roberts has now dissented six (6) times in argued cases decided on the merits this Term.  By contrast, Justice Stevens has dissented twenty (20) times in such cases.
• The Court has granted certiorari in thirty-one (31) cases for OT10, almost half of which (fourteen (14)) are from the Ninth Circuit.

Full post as published by SCOTUSBLOG on June 26, 2010 (boomark / email).