This isn’t really news anymore, is it, since the extreme shrinkage of the docket in the first years of the Roberts Court stabilized a few years back.

From the NYTs:

In the early 1980s, the Supreme Court decided more than 150 cases a year. These days, it decides about half that many.

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court advocacy clinic at Yale Law School held a conference to explore the mystery of the court’s shrinking docket. Law professors presented data, theories and speculation. Expensive lawyers told rueful stories about can’t-miss cases that somehow did not make the cut.

Some participants blamed the newer justices, others their clerks. Some blamed Congress, saying it is not cranking out enough confusing legislation. And some blamed the Justice Department, which is filing fewer appeals.

But there emerged nothing like a definitive answer to why the court now selects perhaps 80 cases from more than 8,000 requests for review it receives every year.

The most striking possible explanation came from David R. Stras, a researcher at the University of Minnesota Law School. A crop of five new justices who joined the court starting in 1986, he found, voted to hear cases far less often than the justices they replaced. Continue reading →