For law geeks with small children, the highlight of every New Years Eve is the quiet posting of Chief Justice Roberts’s Year-End Report on the federal courts website. It is a predictably comfortable document that invariably begins with a 200-year-old anecdote, proceeds through a single chosen topic in 10th-grade detail, and ends with a brief recitation of court statistics. In other words, it’s a little like Dave Barry’s annual year-end column, if that column were written by John Roberts instead of Dave Barry.
This year the Chief Justice’s focus is on court preparedness in the face of terror and natural disaster — an appropriate enough topic in light of last year’s hurricane season. He also includes a short discussion of the courts’ forthcoming internal sexual harassment investigation.
Finally, some interesting statistical notes:
- The Supreme Court’s docket fell again, with a little under three percent fewer filings and only 61 signed opinions.
- Filings in the Courts of Appeal fell sixteen percent, but civil appeals were actually up one percent.
- Filings in the federal district courts fell eight percent, and bankruptcy filings fell two percent.
I will probably have more to say on these figures in subsequent posts. In the meantime, Happy New Year.
The Interdependent Third Branch 