9th Circuit Cases Make Up 'Staggering' Percentage of Supreme Court Docket
The U.S. Supreme Court has 48 cases on the docket so far this term, and 20 of them hail from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
SCOTUSblog says the number amounts to a “staggering” 42 percent of the court’s docket. The 9th Circuit has always supplied a plurality of the Supreme Court’s docket, but the increase this year is dramatic, the blog says.
The court is likely to accept about 20 more cert petitions between now and early January, according to University of California at Irvine law dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who wrote a Supreme Court preview for ABAJournal.com.
Since 2003, the percentage of 9th Circuit cases on the Supreme Court docket ranged from a low of 14 percent in the October 2007 term to a high of 32 percent last term, SCOTUSblog says. The court reversed the 9th Circuit last term in 19 and out 26 cases, a 79 percent reversal rate.
