Petitions to Watch: Opening Conference

UPDATE 2: One-sentence summaries of the questions presented in each case on our list of “reasonable” cert. grants are now featured on the site where you can view the full selection (here).

With the Supreme Court’s first Conference of the term fast approaching, Tom has identified various petitions that appear to have at least a reasonable chance of being granted. We have collected the full cert. petitions in each of these cases and made them available for download; click here to see the list and to read the full petitions [UPDATE 9/15: 05-1343, mistakenly omitted, has been added to the list, and three others have been removed]. At this point, no one at the blog is going to comment further on any specific cases, although future posts may feature analysis of select pending petitions.

One question in all of this is: what does it mean for a petition to be singled out as having a “reasonable” chance of being granted? To explain this notion, we’ll take a brief look at the data.

In past years, roughly 80%-90% of all the cases in which certiorari was granted were included on Tom’s list of cases having a reasonable chance. (Tom does not consider pauper or pro se petitions, as they comprise a very large number of petitions but a very small percentage of the grants.) If we suppose that approximately 80 cases are granted each year, that means Tom had flagged roughly 70 of them as having a reasonable chance at cert.

But how fine is Tom’s sieve? Well, so far this year he has looked at the petitions for 268 paid cases carried over from the 05 docket and the first 219 paid cases of the 06 term for a total of 468 petitions. Of those, he has placed 60 in the “reasonable” category (35 of which will be considered by the Court on 9/25, and so are linked to for this post). That’s 13%, or roughly 1 out of 8.

Additionally, the 05 docket consisted of 1672 paid cases, and we can expect a similar number this year. So, at Tom’s current rate, he will identify roughly 210 petitions per term as having a “reasonable” chance of being granted. As we have seen, about 70 grants will emerge from that group of 210.

All that leads up to the following: if Tom’s past success as a prognosticator is any indication, roughly one-third (33%) of the petitions that Tom has identified will be granted (about 70 out of about 210). Keeping in mind the fact that the Court only grants about 4-5% of all of the paid petitions it receives, that is the best notion of reasonableness that we can provide.