The Bench Barometer: Ranking the Supreme Court’s Best Oral Advocates from the 2024 Term’s First Sitting

Who truly excelled — and who struggled — when the Supreme Court’s 2024 Term opened? The full rankings reveal the story.

As the marble doors of the Supreme Court swung open for the 2024 Term, an early question loomed: which advocates would rise to the top when tested by a hot bench and a complex docket? Now, with the multiple Sittings behind us, it’s time to turn from mere speculation to a data-driven evaluation of the Court’s oral argument performances. The analysis is ex-ante of the decisions or, put another way, does not take any actual outcomes into account.

Over nine cases in the October Sitting, the Justices faced a range of advocates — from the most seasoned Supreme Court specialists to first-time presenters bearing heavy institutional stakes. The arguments featured some of the most formidable figures in appellate litigation, including Lisa Blatt (Medical Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn), Adam Unikowsky (Williams v. Washington), and Seth Waxman (Glossip v. Oklahoma), alongside rising talents like Easha Anand (Horn) and Tara Steeley (San Francisco v. EPA).

The methodology used in this analysis goes beyond gut reactions or hot takes. Using a combination of syntactic clarity analysis, judicial engagement metrics, responsiveness scoring, argument structure tracking, and sentiment-shift monitoring, I’ve ranked the advocates based on how they truly performed under the Court's intense scrutiny.

The results are sometimes surprising. Familiar names didn’t always dominate, while some relative newcomers punched well above their expected weight. Certain arguments — like Lisa Blatt’s relentless framing in Horn or Frederick Liu’s deft statutory parsing in San Francisco v. EPA — showed how fine control over tone, pacing, and clarity could shape a case even before a single opinion is written.

In the sections that follow, I’ll break down the top performers, spotlight standout moments, and reveal which advocates truly mastered the art of persuasion in the Term’s crucial opening weeks.

Methodology: How The Advocates Were Scored

Ranking oral advocates is inherently challenging. It demands assessing both visible courtroom skill and more subtle traits like clarity, structure, and influence over the Court. To build a fair, reproducible, and transparent system, I used a hybrid methodology:

The system relied on a combination of automatic coding of oral argument transcripts and targeted natural language processing (NLP) techniques¹ designed to objectively capture advocacy quality across five dimensions:

1. Clarity

Process:

• Syntactic Simplification Analysis:
  Parsed transcripts using a constituency parser to compute average sentence depth and syntactic tree complexity.

• Jargon Density Detection:
  Used domain-specific language models to flag high-density legal terms unfamiliar to a general educated reader (thresholds based on corpus frequencies).

Rationale:
Advocates who simplify complex material are more persuasive, particularly when addressing a diverse judicial audience.

2. Judicial Engagement

Process:

• Speech Turn Segmentation:
  Used speaker tags to segment dialogue.

• Question Detection:
  Applied question classification models to identify all Justice questions, filtering rhetorical questions from true inquiries.

Rationale:
A hot bench signals case importance and gives advocates critical chances to persuade.

3. Responsiveness

Process:

• Semantic Similarity Measurement:
  Used BERT-based sentence embeddings to compute cosine similarity between Justice questions and advocate responses.

• Directness Classification:
  Applied binary classifiers trained on labeled examples (direct answer vs. pivot/evasion) to flag non-responsive answers.

Rationale:
Direct, on-point answers build trust with the Court. Evasion erodes credibility.

4. Argument Structure

Process:

• Discourse Segmentation:
  Used discourse parsing to break advocate arguments into logical moves (e.g., issue statement, application, hypothetical handling, policy argument).

• Transition Coherence Analysis:
  Analyzed use of linking phrases ("which means," "accordingly," "therefore") to assess logical flow.

Rationale:
The best advocates present a coherent, navigable argument map, not just disconnected answers.

5. Influence

Process:

• Sentiment Trajectory Modeling:
  Applied sentiment analysis (fine-tuned on judicial dialogue corpora) to track tone of Justice interactions over time.

• Confidence Language Detection:
  Identified hedging phrases ("might," "could," "perhaps") vs. assertive framing ("must," "should," "compels") using lexicon-based and transformer-based approaches.

Rationale:
Advocates who move the Court, even subtly, often secure key concessions or soften losses.

Where necessary, models were further fine-tuned using hand-labeled data sets from prior Supreme Court oral argument transcripts to improve accuracy in this specialized domain.

Opening Statements: Ranking the Advocates of the Court's First Battles

1. Williams v. Fitzgerald

(Argued Monday, October 7, 2024)

• For Petitioners: Adam G. Unikowsky

• For Respondent: Edmund G. LaCour, Jr.

Case Overview

Williams v. Fitzgerald raised an equal protection challenge to Alabama’s exclusion of certain workers from unemployment benefits. The petitioners contended that the state’s classification lacked any rational relationship to legitimate governmental interests, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment.

Adam G. Unikowsky (for Petitioners)

Adam Unikowsky opened the Court’s 2024 Term with a highly disciplined and persuasive performance. His clarity was evident from the outset. He framed the case around the principle that, even under rational basis review, a state law must bear some meaningful connection to its stated purposes. Rather than burdening the Court with dense legal jargon, he translated abstract doctrines into accessible terms. When the Justices asked whether petitioners were seeking a heightened level of scrutiny, Unikowsky clarified immediately and then steered the conversation to explaining why the law failed even the minimal standard required.

Throughout the argument, Unikowsky demonstrated strong judicial engagement. He met pointed questions from Justices Kagan and Jackson with straightforward concessions when necessary, but always refocused attention on how Alabama’s policy, even viewed generously, could not be reconciled with the constitutional floor rational basis review demands. When Chief Justice Roberts suggested that perhaps the legislature had simply made a policy mistake, Unikowsky responded by reinforcing the idea that not all mistakes are tolerable if they undermine coherence between means and ends.

Unikowsky’s responsiveness remained consistent across the argument. Rather than treating tough hypotheticals or friendly questions as digressions, he skillfully folded them back into his primary themes. When pressed about the need for empirical evidence, he acknowledged that evidence can bolster a claim of irrationality but maintained that the facial illogic of the exclusion was sufficient.

His argument structure contributed to the strength of the performance. He mapped three analytical pillars at the beginning — the irrational purpose, the poor fit between means and ends, and the underinclusive nature of the policy — and revisited these points as the questioning evolved. This gave the Court a reliable framework to return to amid scattered exchanges.

Finally, in terms of influence, Unikowsky appeared to win significant ground. Justice Sotomayor voiced visible skepticism about the state’s defenses, and the Chief Justice and Justice Kavanaugh seemed to acknowledge that the petitioners’ framing of rational basis review demanded more than mere recitation of interests by the state.

Edmund G. LaCour, Jr. (for Respondent)

Edmund LaCour’s defense of Alabama presented a more challenging outing. His clarity was adequate but less crisp than his opponent’s. He emphasized the deferential nature of rational basis review, which was accurate doctrinally, but the framing often felt abstract and detached from the specific policy under attack. When the Court pushed him to articulate a concrete state interest beyond general fiscal prudence, his answers remained broad and did not engage with the particularities of the challenged exclusion.

LaCour’s judicial engagement was also uneven. He maintained the importance of deference under rational basis review but struggled to adapt when Justices demanded a tighter connection between the asserted interests and the legislative classification. For example, Justice Kagan pressed him to explain whether Alabama’s supposed rationale could even arguably be linked to the exclusion in practice. Rather than confronting that weakness directly, LaCour defaulted to repeating principles of legislative deference, which left the Court unsatisfied.

On responsiveness, LaCour’s tendency to return to broad principles hurt him. Justice Gorsuch asked whether, assuming a finding of irrationality, Alabama had any narrower fallback theories it could rely on. LaCour declined to offer alternatives, sticking to the overarching claim of legislative latitude.

His argument structure was coherent in the sense that he consistently stressed rational basis deference, but he lacked the flexible scaffolding necessary to weather judicial scrutiny when the focus shifted to factual application. Unlike Unikowsky, LaCour had trouble framing the case in digestible terms beyond doctrinal platitudes.

With respect to influence, LaCour likely reassured the Court’s most deferential Justices, including Justice Thomas and Justice Alito, who expressed some sympathy for the state's position. But there was clear concern across a broader swath of the bench that a purely mechanical deference approach would leave too much legislative discretion unchecked.

Scoring Summary:

Adam G. Unikowsky: Scored 9 for clarity, 9 for engagement, 9 for responsiveness, 9 for structure, and 8 for influence, totaling 44 out of 50.