Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
Endnotes: Chapter 5
- ↑ By transparency, we do not mean opening the Court’s internal deliberations to the public but rather increasing the consistency of reason-giving in important cases and easing public access to the Court’s already public activity.
- ↑ Orders of the Court - Term Year 2020, Supreme Court of the United States, https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/ordersofthecourt/20 (last accessed Sept. 18, 2021). The Court releases a list of orders each Monday that it sits and issues “miscellaneous” orders in individual cases “at any time.” Id. These orders are catalogued by date of issuance on the Court’s website and later consolidated into a set of Orders Lists published in the bound volumes of the United States Reports, in a section following the Opinions of the Court. The United States Reports are generally printed multiple years after a case is resolved. See Richard J. Lazarus, The (Non)finality of Supreme Court Opinions, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 540, 543 (2014) (noting a five-year delay). In the interim, the Court’s orders and its opinions related to orders can be found in various places on the Court’s website, including: on a page entitled “Opinions Relating to Orders;” at the end of the regular or miscellaneous “Orders List” catalogued online; and in the preliminary (and eventually final) version of the United States Reports, digital images of which the Court makes available for free online. Finally, the Court’s orders (but not the opinions relating to those orders) are separately printed in the Journal of the Supreme Court, a bound volume printed at the conclusion of each Term that contains “the official minutes of the Court,” digital images of which are also made available online. Journal, Supreme Court of the United States, https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/journal.aspx (last accessed Sept. 18, 2021).
- ↑ The Court also sometimes issues per curiam decisions finally resolving a given case. These per curiam opinions appear on the Court’s web page and in the United States Reports alongside other “Opinions of the Court” issued via the merits docket, even though they are often decided summarily without the robust procedures normally associated with merits cases. In addition, the Court sometimes resolves a pending case by granting a petition for certiorari, vacating the opinion below, and remanding for further proceedings (typically with brief instructions, such as to consider a recently issued opinion of the Court). These summary dispositions, known colloquially as “GVRs,” for grant, vacate, and remand, appear on the Orders List. Individual Justices also occasionally issue “in chambers” opinions in their capacities as Circuit Justice; these opinions are posted on the Court’s web page and eventually published in the United States Reports.
- ↑ See, e.g., Albert M. Sacks, The Supreme Court, 1953 Term - Foreword, 68 Harv. L. Rev. 96, 103 (1954); Ernest J. Brown, The Supreme Court, 1957 Term - Foreword: Process of Law, 72 Harv. L. Rev. 77 (1957); Henry M. Hart, Jr., The Supreme Court, 1958 Term - Foreword: The Time Chart of the Justices, 73 Harv. L. Rev. 84, 89 & n.13 (1959); Alexander M. Bickel & Harry H. Wellington, Legislative Purpose and the Judicial Process: The Lincoln Mills Case, 71 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 3–4 (1957). Many of these criticisms focused on summary dispositions occurring at a time when the Court’s docket was more crowded with mandatory appeals (which have largely been eliminated from its present, almost entirely discretionary merits docket). See, e.g., Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States 20 (June 30, 2021) (written testimony of Judith Resnik, Yale Law School) [hereinafter Resnik Testimony] (noting that between 2018 and 2021, while certiorari was granted in 217 cases, only 4 cases arose from the Court’s mandatory appellate jurisdiction), https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Resnik-PDF-Presidential-Commission.pdf.
- ↑ See, e.g., William O. Douglas, The Supreme Court and its Caseload, 45 Cornell L.Q. 40 (1960); Eugene Gressman, Much Ado About Certiorari, 52 Geo. L.J. 742 (1964).
- ↑ See, e.g., Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl, The Supreme Court’s Controversial GVRs—and an Alternative, 107 Mich. L. Rev. 711 (2009); Ira P. Robbins, Hiding Behind the Cloak of Invisibility: The Supreme Court and Per Curiam Opinions, 86 Tul. L. Rev. 1197 (2012).
December 2021 | 227
