Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
The Commission received testimony from several witnesses about the sources of advocacy and information provided to the Supreme Court as it selects and decides cases. Their testimony addressed patterns in advocacy before the Court, including the fact that a small group of specialized lawyers appears in a large proportion of cases. It also addressed the role of interested non-parties, called amici curiae, in providing information to the Court beyond the parties’ briefs and the record in a given case. These analyses focused on the conduct and characteristics of advocates and amici rather than of the Court itself. We do not endorse this testimony or the proposals contained within it. But we believe it would be informative for the public discourse for this Report to highlight portions of the testimony.
The witnesses whose statements are excerpted here are Deepak Gupta; the Supreme Court Practitioners’ Committee, chaired by Kenneth Geller and Maureen Mahoney; Richard Lazarus; and Allison Orr Larsen. Their full testimony, respectively, is available on the Commission website at the links noted below.[1]
Excerpts from Testimony of Deepak Gupta, Gupta Wessler PLLC
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Gupta-SCOTUS-CommissionTestimony-Final.pdf
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The Diversity of the Supreme Court Bar
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Today, roughly 70 lawyers are considered part of the elite Supreme Court bar, filing less than 1% of the petitions for certiorari before the Court but participating in nearly half the cases the Court selects.
The demographics of these elite few are telling. From 2012 to 2018, women appearing before the Court constituted only 12 to 21% of advocates. In the 2019 term, 155 oral argument appearances were made before the Court, only twenty of which were made by women and only twenty-seven of which were made by advocates of color. In the entire 2019 term, only one woman of color appeared before the Court.
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