The SDFLA Blog is dedicated to providing news and notes regarding federal practice in the Southern District of Florida. The New Times calls the blog "the definitive source on South Florida's federal court system." All tips on court happenings are welcome and will remain anonymous. Please email David Markus at dmarkus@markuslaw.com

Monday, August 31, 2015

SCOTUS: "Long Conference" on 9/28

The NY Times has an interesting piece this morning on the "long conference" where all of the summer petitions will be considered. The odds of a grant from the long conference are particularly low. Can't the Court meet a few times over the summer to consider the filed cert petitions? Would that be such a burden in addition to the 70-75 cases that they hear a year?

Four weeks from now, on Sept. 28, the Supreme Court
justices will gather in private for an annual ritual called the “long
conference.” They will consider the roughly 2,000 petitions to hear
appeals that have piled up over the summer. And they will reject almost
every one.

“The summer list is where petitions go to die,” said Gregory G. Garre, a solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration who is now at Latham & Watkins.

The
odds of persuading the Supreme Court to hear a case are always long. At
the conferences held on many Fridays during the term, which lasts from
October to June, the justices consider perhaps 200 petitions at a time
and grant about 1.1 percent of them. At the long conference, the rate is
roughly half of that, around 0.6 percent.

That difference is significant. “For the majority of petitioners, the most important moment is trying to get in the door,” said Jeffrey L. Fisher,
a law professor at Stanford who argues frequently before the court.
“Once you’re in, the statistics say, you have a two-thirds chance of
winning. So the difference between a grant and a deny is truly the
difference for a handful of cases on the summer list between winning and
losing.”

Lawyers and scholars have various
theories about why the long conference is so inhospitable. One is that
the justices, who decide about 70 cases a year, do not want to grant too
many petitions right away for fear of having to turn down better ones
later on.

“It’s like the beginning of a long
buffet,” Professor Fisher said. “You don’t want to fill your plate with
too much stuff, lest you not have room for some delicious items at the
end of the line.”

Meantime Liptak (the author of the article) and Orin Kerr are fighting about whether Justice Thomas here. Here is the original NY Times piece that Kerr take on. Who has the better of the debate? Kerr seems to make valid points about the flimsy statistics cited by Liptak.

6 comments:

My cat is annoying the bejesus out of me. My gf dumped me and left this bag of furry bones behind. He eats like there is no tomorrow. Used the litter box all day long and at night demands two pillows and half the bed and he snores. That being said he us better than the nasty so and so who left him behind. At least he doesn't have access (yet) to my credit card.

Look, like the rest of us rich land owners, the Justices have to go home to their farms and ensure that their crops are properly harvested and brought to market. They cannot be expected to also actually work over the Summer.

Not to defend the S.Ct justices but most of them do work over the summer either writing or teaching or both. And there is work done on the petitions over the summer by staff. Much ado about nothing. Poor Liptak has nothing to write about so he's flailing around. Embarrassing.

The Southern District of Florida blog was started by David Oscar Markus, who is a criminal trial and appellate lawyer in Miami, Florida. He frequently practices in federal courts around the country, including his hometown, the Southern District of Florida and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. He is a former law clerk to then-Chief Judge of the District, Edward B. Davis.