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mousey musings
Friday, May 12, 2006
SCOTUSblog: Fewer grants for next Term -- This is a minor blog post, but I think it deserves a bit more attention. One of my chief complaints about the Rehnquist Court was its laziness -- the justices routinely turned down hundreds of cert-worthy cases in order to keep the docket small. Moreover, the Court's tendency to limit its holdings exacerbated the problem of circuit splits. Under Rehnquist, we saw the country fragment along Circuit Court lines, with widely differing federal law from region to region. In opinions such as Crawford and Blakely, the Court upset the whole cartload of apples and showed zero interest in minimizing the inevitable chaos that resulted. This Court makes policy, and it should realize that chopping a decision into four or five years' worth of cases is not in the best interest of justice or the rule of law. Moreover, the Court could easily hear three times its present caseload (as it did in the pre-Rehnquist days) and resolve some of the issues clogging the appelate dockets. But now it seems that short workdays, long vacations, and a sense that "restraint" means doing as little work as possible may continue to drive the Court's docket under new management.
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