The Power Players Behind Supreme Court Petitions: Who’s Filing Amicus Briefs—and Who’s Winning
As top advocacy groups and legal powerhouses flood the Supreme Court with amicus briefs, new data reveals who’s shaping the docket—and who’s falling short.
One of the first papers I read in graduate school was Caldeira and Wright’s (1988) article Organized Interests and Agenda Setting in the Supreme Court [paywall link] where the authors found, “Not only does one brief in favor of certiorari [the Court granting merits review of a case] significantly improve the chances of a case being accepted, but two, three, and four briefs improve the chances even more. This finding holds even after we (statistically) take into account other important forces in the certiorari process, such as whether conflict existed in the lower courts.” The findings have been reconfirmed and extended by many scholars since then (for example). In a more recent paper though, based on data for the terms OT 1968, 1982, 1990, and 2007, Caldeira, Wright, and Zorn found, “At the same time that the number of amicus filings on certiorari have grown – and perhaps owing to it – the influence of those briefs has steadily declined.”
This article looks at the 7,585 petitions for cert for starting at the end of the 2022 Term (June 30, 2023) and moving through the most recent petitions. 1,312 petitions are yet to be decided so 6,273 petitions from this set were already resolved. Within this group of 5,878 petitions were denied, 335 were granted, and 60 were GVRed (granted, vacated and remanded generally meaning the decisions were vacated based on a merits decision in another case that then becomes controlling on the issue).
How much impact did cert stage amicus briefs, friend of the court briefs that almost always argue for the Court to review a case decided by a court below, have on the Court’s selection of merits cases? How frequently are these briefs filed? Who is filing them? Who is most successful in determining when to file these briefs? These questions are all examined below with the most recent cert petition data.