Amicus Deep Dive 2024 [Deep Dive #4]
A look at who is dominating the amicus terrain in the Supreme Court and beyond
The Supreme Court receives somewhere near 10,000 filed documents each term. Most of these are in the form of petitions for certiorari, but a not insubstantial minority comes in the form of amicus (friend of the court) briefs. This is usually due, at least in part, to one or more cases drawing substantial interest in the form of 100 or more amicus briefs. Recently these cases have included SFSA (Affirmative Action) and Dobbs (I previously compiled a list of high amicus count generating cases for past terms). In OT 2023 (last term) Grants Pass and Loper Bright both had large numbers of amicus filings.
An often-overlooked factor when looking at amicus behavior is filings outside of the Supreme Court, and yet hundreds if not thousands of amicus briefs are filed each year even excluding numbers related to the United States Supreme Court. They are a useful gauge for the public to assess dispersed case importance as those without direct knowledge of a case can guess that there is some unique importance to cases where non-parties want to have both a say and to express their position to the judge(s) deciding a case.
A strong driver of these seemingly ever-increasing numbers is a group of institutionalized repeat filers. I’ve looked at many of these groups in past blog posts and scholarly works and this has helped me track groups that are making a large impact on courts with their amicus briefs.
Impact is one of those mysterious concepts that is not easily understood. Sometimes amicus impact can be discerned by a citation in an opinion. Other times the impact is opaquer. A brief may lead to linguistic decisions or to considering a different position. It may help show a judge or justice that a seemingly insignificant view is actually more widely held. While they may not regularly affect judges’ votes, they clearly have the ability to help shape judges’ understandings of the policy implications of their decisions.
Based on my assessment of impactful groups, I chose 12 to analyze in this post. These groups are the Cato Institute, NAACP, Public Citizen, Manhattan Institute, New Civil Liberties Alliance, Washington Legal Foundation, Constitutional Accountability Center, American Civil Liberties Union, United States Chamber of Commerce, Alliance Defending Freedom, Pacific Legal Foundation, and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
In the following analysis I look at various dimensions of their Supreme Court amicus filings over the past term (OT 2023) including how often their briefs were associated with the winning parties on the merits. I also look at their total filings over the 2024 year in all courts.*
All Filings
The overall number of briefs filed in 2024 for the 12 analyzed groups is below