It has been almost two months since the completion of the Supreme Court’s 2016 term. Scholars and analysts have pored over Court’s decisions. SCOTUSBlog released its Stat Pack which contains many interesting statistical trends and details from the term. Each term, a group of professors now organized through the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law put together a new iteration of the Supreme Court Database which contains even more detailed coding on each case and which scales the measures so that trends can be tracked over multiple terms. These data often lead to the discovery of new information about the term that was not easy to perceive without the longitudinal organization of a term’s data along with those from prior terms.
This post utilizes some of these newly released data to uncover three unique aspects of the Court from this past term. The first is the size of the Court’s majority across different types of cases. The second is the length of time between oral argument and when the Court issued its opinions. Lastly are differences in the justices’ voting relationships with one another.
