The following is by Professor David Stras of the University of Minnesota Law School. Professor Stras will occasionally provide commentary on the Court’s business and alert readers to significant academic developments regarding the Supreme Court.
My past posts have brought interesting developments and articles to the attention of SCOTUSblog readers. In this post, I would like to ask the opinion of our readership about an issue that will be the focus of a forthcoming article by Timothy R. Johnson (University of Minnesota Political Science Department) and me on the factors that influence each individual Justice’s decision to grant or deny certiorari. Using the voting patterns that we obtained from the docket sheets of the Blackmun papers, we will run multivariate regression models for each of the six Justices who were on the Court prior to Justice Blackmun’s retirement in 1993, as well as aggregate models for the Court as a whole. We have collected data for a number of the variables that we (and other scholars) hypothesize are important to the Justices’ decisions to grant certiorari. In no particular order, these factors include: (1) the recommendation of the pool memo; (2) the presence of a lower court conflict; (3) the number of amicus briefs filed at the certiorari stage; (4) the presence of the solicitor general as the petitioner at the cert stage; (5) the issue area of the case; (6) ideological direction in/of the court below; and (7) the relationship between the ideology of the Justice making the certiorari decision and the ideology of the lower court decision.
If any of these variables strike you as irrelevant, or if any other factors immediately come to mind, please post in the comments section or privately e-mail me at dstras@umn.edu. I think Supreme Court practitioners who read this blog, as well as others, can be of great assistance to our project. In turn, I hope our paper will provide some insight to practitioners as to which of the factors are most important to the Justices during the certiorari stage.