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A Separation-of-Powers Approach to the Supreme Court’s Shrinking Caseload

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Elizabeth A. Lane
Elizabeth A. Lane*
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University, USA
*
Contact the author at elane8@lsu.edu.
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Abstract

Since the end of the 1980s the Supreme Court has cut its caseload nearly in half. While this decrease has not gone unnoticed, researchers have largely focused their explanations on institutional factors, such as changes in personnel, creation of the certiorari pool, or an increase in the amount of discretion justices have to set their agenda. Most existing work fails to consider how the preferences of members of Congress and the president also contribute to this staggering decrease. I provide the first systematic examination of how extrainstitutional influences affect the size of the Court’s caseload. I examine the 1951–2016 terms of the Court to reveal that a constraining political environment significantly reduces the number of cases the justices agree to hear each term. These results suggest that the justices consider the preferences of actors in the other branches of government much earlier than their decisions on the merits.

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Type
Articles
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Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

Thank you to the helpful reviewers and the editor and the Journal of Law and Courts for their thoughtful feedback and direction. Thank you to Michael Bailey for making his ideology data publicly available, to Sarah Binder for sharing her updated gridlock data, and to Ken Moffett and his coauthors—Forrest Maltzman, Karen Miranda, and Charles Shipan—for sharing data from their 2016 publication. Finally, thank you to Ryan Black, Ezra Brooks, Michael Colaresi, Eric Gonzalez Juenke, Jonathan King, Ian Ostrander, Jessica Schoenherr, Corwin Smidt, and Joe Ura for their thoughtful comments and help on several iterations of this project. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the numerical results in the article are available in the JLC Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NGPLNC.

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