Speakers: Professor Tejas N. Narechania, Ankur Jain, Natasha Batra, Amanda Jorgensen
Abstract: The Supreme Court is known to grant review in cases presenting conflict among the federal Courts of Appeals and the states’ Supreme Courts. But the Court also reserves a substantial portion of its docket for other “important” cases—cases presenting questions that have not been, but should be, settled by the Supreme Court. This importance standard, set out in Supreme Court Rule 10, has been variously criticized as “murky,” “hopelessly indeterminate,” or even “intentionally vague.” These critics allege that the Court’s own process for setting one-half (or more) of its docket is essentially standardless, leaving everyone else basically clueless as to what cases will merit review.
We can, in fact, say more about what’s important to the Supreme Court. We simply must look beyond the Supreme Court’s Rules. The Court’s merits decisions sometimes offer a brief yet informative description of the Court’s decision to grant review. In some cases, the Court seems to suggest that its review is founded on concerns for interbranch comity or aimed at structuring intrajudicial authority, among other examples. This project presents a text and data analysis of several thousand Supreme Court opinions describing the Court's rationale for review, thereby collectively setting out a standard for what has been “important” to the Supreme Court.
