Determinants of the Amount of Time Taken by the Vinson Court To Process its Full-Opinion Cases

Abstract

Determinants of the Amount of Time Taken by the Vinson Court To Process its Full-Opinion Cases Jan Palmer and Saul Brenner To Process Its Full-Opinion Cases Isitpossible to identifyand to measure some of the factors that determine the amount of time needed by the Supreme Court to proc­ ess a full-opinion case? Or, are the cases so heterogeneous that it is impossible to find any consistent predictors of how much time will pass between the conference vote on-the-merits and the announcement of the official opin­ ion? To answer these questions, we investigate the Vinson Court (the October 1946 Term through the October 1952 Term). This Court is chosenbecause ofthe availability of a complete dataset containing information necessary to test a number of hypotheses: the individual Justice’s conference votes, the dates of these votes, and the names of the Justices who were assigned or reassigned the responsibility for writing the majority opinion.1 Although the number of cases docketed has increased, the Supreme Court’s procedures have not changed substantially since Vinson’s tenure. Thus, this study of the Vinson Court not only provides insight into the decisionmaking of that Court but also generates hypotheses that can be re­ tested when complete and reliable conference vote and other data from later periods become available. Previous Studies Observers ofthe Supreme Court have long wondered how Justices spend their time. This question is related to many others: Is the Court overworked? Should its jurisdiction be altered? Is it deciding too many or too few cases? Has the steadygrowth in the number of cases docketed each term reduced the Court’s productivity? The Justices do not publish time charts and most of their activities are safely hidden from public view. Thus, scholars are forced to engage in educated guessing to an­ swer these questions. Hart2 provided the first appraisal of how Justices of the modern Court spend their time. He estimated the amountsoftime needed to complete various activities and inferred that the Court was overworked. Hart’s study was criticized by Justice Douglas who claimed that the Court’s caseload was not a burden.3 But the ReportoftheStudy Group on the Caseloadofthe Supreme Court4 (frequently known as the “Freund Report”), agreed with Hart’s finding that the Court was overworked. Casper & Posner5 extended Hart’s analysis and concluded that the amount of time spent screening cases had in­ creased but that the Court was not overworked. All these studies examined the typical Justice rather than the Court as a whole. Rathjen6 took a very different approach in his analysis ofthe timeneededtoprocess fullopinion cases. Rather than studying individual Justices, he examined the Court as a whole for the 1964-1973 Terms and concluded that proc­ essing time was positively related to impor­ tance, level ofdissension, and whether the case dealt with “Freedom and Equality” issues. He also found that business issues and cases in which a liberal Justice wrote the opinion were processed more quickly. LikeRathjen, we examinethe Court as VINSON COURT 143 a whole. We retest some ofhis findings and are able to test additional hypotheses because we have the advantage of using data derived from the Justices’ private papers to which Rathjen did not have access. Processing Full-Opinion Cases on the Vinson Court Almost all cases arrived at the Vinson Court either by a writ ofappeal or as a petition for a writ of certiorari. Noting probable juris­ diction for an appeal or granting a certiorari petitionrequired positive votesfrom four ofthe nine Justices. Most cases were denied review, which meant that the decision of the lower court remained the law in the case. If a case was accepted for review, the litigants submitted written briefs after which the case was argued orally before the Court. A few days later, there was a secret conference vote at which time the Justices voted either to affirm or reverse the decision of the lower court. The Court sometimes had additional conference votes on-the-merits if the original conference vote resulted in an equally divided Court or if the opinion writing process uncov­ ered new issues or changed several minds. After the conference vote, the Chief Justice, if he...