Supreme Court's Work Load
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Description
With the growth of population and the enormous expansion of federal law in the post-New Deal period, the business of the federal courts has mushroomed. This increase is most striking in the first two tiers of the federal judicial pyramid. In the years 1960-1983, cases filed in United States District Courts more than tripled, from 80,000 to 280,000, but cases docketed in the United States Courts Of Appeals during the same period increased eightfold, from 3,765 to 25,580. To cope with this rise in appeals, Congress more than doubled the number of appellate judgeships. Not surprisingly, a similar growth can be found in Supreme Court filings: decade averages have increased in units of a thousand, from 1,516 per term in the 1950s to 2,639 in the 1960s, to 3,683 in the 1970s, to 4,422 in the 1981 term and 4,806 in the 1988 term. The contrast between this explosion in federal judicial business and the fixed decisional capacity of the Supreme Court—the nine Justices sitting as a full bench hear an average of 150 argued cases per year—has led to persistent calls for enhancing the appellate capacity of the federal system. A number of proposals have emerged since 1970, none resulting in legislation. In 1971 the Study Commission on the Caseload of the Supreme Court, chaired by Paul A. Freund of the Harvard Law School, recommended creation of a National Court of Appeals (NCA) that would assume the Supreme Court's task of selecting cases for review. The Freund committee believed that the selection process consumed time and energy the Justices might better spend in deliberation and opinion writing. This proposal died at birth. In 1972, Congress created the Commission on Revision of the Federal Court Appellate System, chaired by Senator Roman Hruska. The Hruska commission envisioned a mechanism for national resolution of open intercircuit conflicts, recommending an NCA that would hear cases referred to it by the Supreme Court or the United States Courts of Appeals. This NCA was to be a permanent tribunal, with its own institutional identity and personnel. In 1983, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger publicly endorsed proposed legislation to create on an experimental basis an Intercircuit Tribunal of the United State Courts of Appeals (ICT), which would decide cases referred to it by the Supreme Court. The ICT would be comprised of judges drawn from the current courts of appeals who would sit for a specified number of years. This proposal drew faint support. Other proposals have sought to enhance national appellate capacity without establishing new tribunals. The most recent recommendation of this type can be found in the 1990 report of the Federal Courts Study Committee, chaired by Judge Joseph F. Weis, Jr. The report urges Congress to give the Supreme Court authority, for an experimental period, to refer cases presenting unresolved intercircuit conflicts to a randomly selected court of appeals for a ruling by that court's full bench. These en banc determinations would be binding on all other courts, save the Supreme Court. Many of these proposals are conceived as measures to alleviate the Supreme Court's work load. The work load problem is, however, not one of obligatory jurisdiction; the Court's appellate jurisdiction has been largely discretionary as far back as the Judiciary Act of 1925, but even more so after 1988 legislation repealing virtually all mandatory appeals. The Justices do have to screen all of the petitions filed. It is doubtful, though, that any of the recent proposals promise much relief on this score. The Freund committee's NCA did, but received widespread criticism for suggesting delegation of the selection function. It is hard to believe referral to an NCA or a randomly selected court of appeals would reduce the Court's screening burden, for the losing party would still be free to appeal to the High Court. Moreover, the Justices will not likely tolerate nationally binding resolutions with which they disagree. Indeed, the Court's case selection process may be significantly complicated by adoption of any of these proposals.
Source Publication
Encyclopedia of the American Constitution
Source Editors/Authors
Leonard W. Levy, Kenneth L. Karst, Dennis J. Mahoney
Publication Date
1992
Volume Number
Suppl. 1
Recommended Citation
Estreicher, Samuel, "Supreme Court's Work Load" (1992). Faculty Chapters. 1359.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1359
