I’m agnostic on the merits or demerits of the cert pool, but I do have experience that might be relevant to this discussion. For the 25+ years that I have been covering the court, I have looked at every paid cert petition and made my own judgment about whether the court would deem it certworthy, and whether it would be newsworthy if granted or if denied. It is in fact quite easy to cull out the handful of petitions on each conference list that require further exploration than a quick glance at the question presented. (Certainly that would also be true of the IFP petitions, which I look at only if they are relisted or if it’s a case I know about or have been following.) It’s a weekly burden but not an overwhelmingly onerous one, and what’s interesting is that the experienced members of the press corps usually agree on which petitions will or ought to be on the justices’ screen. My point is that the raw material itself, rather than variations in who reads it, tends to drive the collective judgment, and I’m not sure the court’s docket-setting function would change much if the cert pool were smaller, or non-existant.Wow. I wonder if anyone else in the United States -- except for Justice Stevens, perhaps -- could say the same.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Greenhouse and the Cert. Pool
If you don't read to the bottom of this Orin Kerr post about the cert. pool at the Supreme Court, you'd miss this comment from NY Times journalist Linda Greenhouse:
"and what’s interesting is that the experienced members of the press corps usually agree on which petitions will or ought to be on the justices’ screen."
ReplyDeleteAnother way of saying that, is that the press corps and the Supreme court simply share similar biases. This scarcely means that the decisions of the Court or the Corps are meritous from a legal perspective.
In fact, given the known biases of the press corps, it would scarcely be possible for the press to always agree with certiori decisions, without the Court sometimes wrongfully denying cert.