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Supreme Court 2017-18 Term Preview: Part I (October arguments)

It’s mid-September which means that the Supreme Court will soon be returning to Washington for this year’s term.  The Supreme Court, for the most part, controls what cases it will schedule for full briefing and oral argument.  For this fall, the Supreme Court has a total of twenty-eight cases (actually a little more, but several cases have been consolidated) available for argument over seventeen argument days.  They have posted the schedule of cases for October and November with the remaining cases likely to be scheduled for December (although some may be heard in January).  It is unclear if the low number of cases is the product of the time that it took to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court or is the continuation of the long-term trend under the last three Chief Justices to gradually reduce the number of cases heard.    However, the numbers tend to support the “reducing the docket” theory.  While the January “holdover” cases are slightly low (only three), the number of cases on which the Supreme Court granted review in February and March are close to average.  The real “below average” months are the months after Justice Gorsuch took the bench.

This part will look at the cases currently scheduled for argument in the  “October” session beginning on October 2.  As in past years, I will be focusing mostly on the “political” case, those dealing with elections or with heated public policy issues.  These cases aren’t the entirety of the Supreme Court docket.  A lot of the Supreme Court docket deals with resolving conflicts over the interpretation of interpretation of federal statutes or handling criminal justice issues.  These cases do not get a lot of media attention, but they do matter to the persons impacted by them.

Of the ten cases on the October docket, three deal with immigration issues.  Two of the cases (Dimaya) and (Jennings) are rearguments from last year.  The belief is that these cases were probably 4-4 splits, but that might not be the case for Jennings. Continue Reading...

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