cert. calendar

[Yoo, Christopher]

People track this information by following the due dates for cert. petitions
and watching the Court's calendar like a hawk.  The master of this is Tom
Goldstein, a former Wald clerk who just left Boies & Schiller to start his
own Supreme Court practice (and who will have his fourth argument next
Term).  Here is Tom's description of the process:

                It is possible to determine how long a case has been under
consideration by the Justices, and to draw some rough inferences about why
the disposition of a case has been delayed. A petition for certiorari is
distributed to the Justices for consideration based on a specific schedule.
Each petition is considered at one of the regular "Conferences," the dates
of which are public information. Each Conference includes (with limited
exceptions) every Petition awaiting action by the Court in which the Brief
in Opposition or waiver of the right to respond to the Petition was filed at
least four weeks beforehand. If a case is not disposed of immediately after
the Conference (i.e., cert. granted or denied), then the petition generally
will either be "held" (because some other case on the Court's docket that
will be resolved in the future raises a similar issue) or "relisted" for a
later Conference, generally the next one to be held. (The prominent
exceptions occur when the Court has issued a further order in the case,
e.g., directing the Respondent to file a response or calling for the record
from the lower court.) To find out if a case has been relisted, wait one day
after the orders from the previous Conference are released and then call the
Supreme Court clerk's office or dial into the Court's bulletin board. You
will be told that the case has been relisted or that "no action" was taken,
which by implication means that it has been held pending another case.

                If a case is relisted once or twice, the most likely reason
is that three Justices have voted to grant cert. and the case is under
consideration by a fourth. If a case is relisted still more times, the most
likely explanations are (a) that the Court is preparing to summarily reverse
the decision below by per curiam opinion, or (b) that a Justice is preparing
a dissent from the denial of certiorari. The latter was the case with
respect to the San Francisco case in question, 99-697, Lambert v. San
Francisco, CA.

                I regularly produce a list of pending cert. petitions that
have the best chance of being granted (with the Conference schedules) and
would be glad to add anyone to the e-mail distribution list.

                -----Original Message-----
                From:   Craig Oren [mailto:oren at CRAB.RUTGERS.EDU]
                Sent:   Thursday, April 06, 2000 2:37 PM
                To:     CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
                Subject:        cert. calendar

                Recently, the Supreme Court denied cert. in a case out of
San Francisco.
                Some commentators noted that the matter had been on the
justices' agenda
                for several weeks. Is there some way of knowing which cert.
petitions will
                be discussed at a given time? How did these commenters know
what had been
                going on?


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                 Professor Craig N. Oren                    telephone
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                 Rutgers School of Law-Camden               fax
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oren at camden.rutgers.edu

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