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Sunday, October 14, 2007
Courts - "Demystifying the U.S. Supreme Court's Cert Granted Process"
Howard Bashman of How Appealing has posted a very useful article on the Supreme Court's cert review process. Here is a sample:
Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, the debate over whether the cert pool is a useful development -- or, instead, something that should be abandoned -- no longer needs to be conducted in the abstract, without the ability to marshal relevant evidence. Although the pool memoranda that the U.S. Supreme Court's law clerks write are treated by the court as confidential documents that hardly ever see the light of day, the papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun contain a treasure trove of these memoranda. And now the memos from the Court's 1986 through 1993 terms are freely available online for all to access and review.I have not conducted a comprehensive review of those pool memos, but my casual examination confirms what I have long suspected: The vast majority of cases on the U.S. Supreme Court's certiorari docket are being denied because they fall far short of satisfying the objective criteria for review. The cases that are closer calls -- those that might satisfy the Court's stringent criteria for review -- receive much more in-depth treatment from the law clerk assigned to prepare the pool memo.
I was also impressed with the fact that, in Blackmun's chambers, it was clear that each pool memo written by a law clerk from another chamber was first examined by one of Blackmun's law clerks to see whether that law clerk agreed with the memo's analysis and recommendation. The Blackmun papers also reflect that Blackmun himself reviewed the pool memos very carefully, with an eye toward reaching his own independent decision on whether or not a given case should be granted review.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 14, 2007 09:33 AM
Posted to Courts in general