OK, the quote is from Media Matters for America, but the following statement caught my eye.
If this is indeed correct, am I reading this correctly? That 77% figure just seems incredibly high to me. My guess is that this does not include all decisions appealed to the SCOTUS, just those that are accepted for appeal. Otherwise we have some major disconnect between judges at the CCOA level and SCOTUS…
OK, the quote is from Media Matters for America, but the following statement caught my eye.
If this is indeed correct, am I reading this correctly? That 77% figure seems incredibly high to me, but I guess the SCOTUS knows how to pick the right cases to hear (i.e. ones they would expect to overturn).
Also, does anyone know the percentage of all cases referred from the CCOA to the SCOTUS that are overturned (not just the ones accepted by the SCOTUS)? That might be a more accurate metric to determine if the 9th circuit has an inordinate number of bad decisions (e.g. if all appeals to the 9th’s decisions were accepted vs. only 10% for the other circuits, that would indicate something askew with the 9th).
That’s just for the 9th circuit, which hands out some of the dumbest decisions in the country.
I’m sorry, I ended up posting this thread before completing the write-up, and thought cancelling the web page would stop it from posting. I’ll alert the moderator and get this thread closed; please respond to the other thread with the same title, thx:-)
I"ve merged the two threads, so it’ll look a bit strange, but your two OP’s were slightly different and I didn’t wish to delete one of them.
I think we can go on from here.
samclem GQ moderator
Um, no, it’s not just for the 9th circuit…
On reading the entire article, the paragraph that quote is excerpted from cites “reversal rate” nationally and for the 9th Circuit for several years, and links to a CalLaw table of comparisons that appears to be the basis for its numbers.
Nowhere, however, does it define “reversal rate,” save in the usage in the quote: “the cases that it chose to hear from appeals of 9th Circuit decisions.” One must presume, therefore, that that is the meaning of the term in the other usages.
(Much of the following, you and others may already know, but let’s walk through the entire concept from scratch.)
Now, what you need to look at here is that many cases are decided at the District Court level and never appealed. Cases which are appealed go to the Circuit Court, and it may hear an appeal or summarily affirm the lower court decision. (Rarely, summarily reverse.)
Now, only one or two cases a year are legally appealed to SCOTUS, in the technical use of the term. Nearly every case SCOTUS hears arrives there by grant of a writ of certiorari, i.e., the court decides that there is a substantive question open that the lower court has not dealt with in an adequately final matter, or there is a substantive question on which different circuits are in conflict. The grant of certiorari is at the discretion of the justices.
The vast majority of petitions for certiorari, the Justices will simply deny. That means the lower court decision stands as final. Second, SCOTUS may decide to grant summary affirmation to the lower court decision. (How often this happens, I don’t know, but I’ve seen instances reported of its being done.) Again, the lower court decision stands.
To “grant cert.” requires the sign-off of four Supreme. That means that at least four of the nine justices must think that there is not only a substantive question worthy of their review at stake, but that there is something in the lower court decision which deserves their review. Otherwise they’d simply let it stand.
So those reversal rates are quite reasonable, because what they’re saying is, of those cases that make it past a multi-step appeals process, at any point of which the lower court decision may be left to stand as final, SCOTUS reverses about three-quarters of the cases heard.
That’s not three-quarters of all cases decided. That’s not even three-quarters of all cases that have cert peritions filed with SCOTUS. That’s three-quarters of the cases they think have a substantive question of law that the lower court didn’t resolve adequately finally.
From the article, it sounds like it’s 77% of the cases which are actually taken by the Supreme Court.
Bear in mind that the Supreme Court hears only a very small fraction of the cases decided by the circuit courts (less than 1%, I believe). Moreover, those cases are not selected at random. For instance, the Supreme Court is much more likely to intervene where two circuit courts are in conflict over an important issue. In such a case, one court or the other is almost certain to be reversed.