Updated Stat Pack available

By Kedar Bhatia
on Jun 3, 2011 at 9:15 am

An updated Stat Pack analyzing all opinions released through May is now available; you can download it in its entirety here.

• Opinions by Sitting
• Cases by Vote Split
• Circuit Scorecard
• Makeup of the Merits Docket
• Opinion Authorship
• Frequency in the Majority
• Justice Agreement
• Days Between Grant and Oral Argument
• Days Between Oral Argument and Opinion
• Term Index
• Pace of Opinions
• Pace of Grants
• Petitions to Watch

Key takeaways:

• We should begin to expect a high percentage of divided cases. From October to March, 65% of opinions were unanimous. During April and May, however, only 26% were unanimous.
• Justice Kennedy’s solo dissent on Tuesday, in Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB, was his first since OT2004 (Wilkinson v. Dotson) and only his second in the last ten years.
• With 31 opinions outstanding, the Court will have an unusually busy June. Over the past four years, the Court has released 26 (OT06), 29 (OT07), 22 (OT08), and 33 (OT09) in the month of June for an average of 27.5 cases. Across the same period, the next busiest months have been April (10.5 cases), January (10.0 cases), May (8.75 cases), and March (8.25 cases).