State of the Term
on May 18, 2005 at 5:15 pm
I thought it couldn’t hurt to summarize briefly where the Court is in deciding the argued cases.
The Court has decided all of the cases argued in the October and November sittings.
By sitting, the Court has outstanding 3 opinions from December, 3 from January, 8 from February, and all of the opinions for March (9) and April (11).
In total, the Court has decided 40 opinions after argument and has 34 remaining.
At this point last Term, the Court had decided 48 cases after argument (8 more) and had 39 remaining. The Terms have a strong parallel in the difficulty of getting the Court’s initial opinions out. This Term, it had to deal with the expedited resolution of the Booker/Fanfan sentencing guidelines challenges – issuing its opinion on January 12. But last Term, it had the still more substantial task of deciding all the challenges to the McCain-Feingold legislation – issuing its opinion on December 10 (albeit with a head start by holding argument on September 8).
So, the Court this Term is behind its pace last Term. But I wouldn’t read much into that fact. Much of the differential stems from the fact that it decided only one case on its most recent opinion day (two days ago) but decided five cases the equivalent day last year. So the Court could easily make up significant ground this coming Monday.
Also, the end of this coming Term is likely to be much less difficult for the Court than either of the past two Terms. Last year, in June the Court still had to resolve (among others) Blakely, Newdow, the detainees cases (3 of them), Sosa, the internet porn case, and Cheney. The year before that, it had (among others), Grutter, Gratz, Lawrence v. Texas, and American Library Association.
This Term is a little more likely to end in late-June with a sigh rather than a bang. In the last couple weeks of June, we can reasonably expect that the Court will be deciding some front-page cases: Grokster (argued Mar. 29), Kelo and Lingle (the takings cases argued Feb. 22), and the Ten Commandments cases (argued Mar. 2).
There will also likely be some very interesting cases to lawyers, if not necessarily America generally — Brand X (argued Mar. 29) and Arthur Andersen (argued Apr. 27).
But the high drama of the last couple of weeks this Term will very likely not be on the decisions, but instead the Court’s composition.
