Smaller U.S. Supreme Court docket

Today's New York Times contains an article about the size of the U.S. Supreme Court's docket (click here), which is about half of what it was in the early 1980's, although the reasons aren't clear. "A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court advocacy clinic at Yale Law School held a conference to explore the mystery of the court’s shrinking docket. Law professors presented data, theories and speculation. Expensive lawyers told rueful stories about can’t-miss cases that somehow did not make the cut. . . . The most striking possible explanation came from David R. Stras, a researcher at the University of Minnesota Law School. A crop of five new justices who joined the court starting in 1986, he found, voted to hear cases far less often than the justices they replaced."

Tags: Supreme Court of the United States