Certiorari Practice:The Supreme Court’s Shrinking Docket

by Stephen M. Shapiro

Ten years ago, Congress passed new legislation making almost all Supreme Court review discretionary rather than obligatory. Prior to this legislation some Justices complained that the Court was badly overworked, indeed too busy to do anything about being too busy. The Court, it was feared, could not adequately screen five thousand petitions for certiorari every year while shouldering the burden of writing opinions on the merits in some 150 cases. But in recent terms the number of opinions rendered by the Court has fallen almost in half. And through its reliance on an enlarged "certiorari pool" for screening cases, the Court has tightened up its own centralized mechanism for quickly disposing of almost seven thousand annual requests for review. This screening system is the Court’s Maginot Line, designed to repel legions of petitioners. Few people today suggest that the Court is overworked. Concern runs in the opposite direction: the Court is not deciding