Even The Tragicomical Newly-Released Supreme Court ‘Cert. Grant’ Statistics Don’t Reveal The Worst Of It
Paid
|
IFP
|
Total
|
|
Disposed
|
1564
|
6090
|
7654
|
Granted
|
59
|
7
|
66
|
Percentage
|
3.77%
|
.114%
|
.862%
|
Paid
|
IFP
|
Total
|
|
Disposed
|
1674.3
|
6384.6
|
8058.9
|
Granted
|
71.8
|
11
|
82.8
|
Percentage
|
4.29%
|
.172%
|
1.03%
|
-
Overall: 1%
-
Paid petition: 4%
-
IFP petition: .1%
But even those bald statistics don’t accurately indicate what’s happening. “IMP” stands for “in forma pauperis.” In order to be permitted to file a Supreme Court “cert. petition” (a petition asking the Court to hear your case in order to consider reversing the lower appellate court’s ruling against you, on some issue of federal law) without paying the filing fee–or, for that matter, in order to be permitted to file any lawsuit or appeal at any level of the state or federal court system, without paying the filing fee to do so–you have to demonstrate that you do not have the filing fee.
The cost of filing a cert. petition–the term “cert. is shorthand for “certiorari,” and is used only to refer to U.S. Supreme Court petitions–actually is roughly $5,000 to $7,000. That’s because the Supreme Court’s Rules require the submission of an “original” and 39 (39!) copies of the cert. petition, which, the Rules require, must be submitted in “booklet” form. “Booklet” form being a term of art: a prescribed size paper, which, suffice it to say, you can’t buy at Staples, card-stock covers of that same prescribed size (not available at Staples either), and a specific type of (expensive, actual-book-style) binding. Only (I believe) three printing companies in the country specialize in this. The petition itself is limited to 30 pages, but the Appendix–relevant court documents and exhibits in the case–must be included in the “booklet” or printed in its own separate “booklet.” Only IFP petitioners can avoid this; they can file just an original and nine copies, on standard-size photocopy paper.
So unless you literally don’t have $300 (many prisoners don’t, of course), and you don’t have $5,000 to $7,000 at your disposal to spend on a lottery ticket, you can’t file a cert. petition at all, unless you’re able to get some nonprofit organization; there are a number of rightwing ones that will litigate for you and pay the expenses, but only the ACLU, to my knowledge, on the left. Good luck, unless you have a real estate “takings” case, a gun-ownership-rights case, a freedom-of-religion/government-discrimination-against-religion case, or a reverse-race-discrimination case.
But I digress. The subject of this post is the number of filed cert. petitions the Court grants. And whose filed cert. petitions the Court grants. And the statistics reflected in the Court’s new report give only part of that story, because a large percentage of the petitions the Court grants each year are those filed by governments–sometimes the federal government, but more often state governments (usually formally in the name of a state government employee or official such as a prison warden, thanks to a peculiarity in constitutional law), or local governments or an official or employee of one, e.g., a police officer. These petitions are counted as “paid” petitions in the Court’s statistics.
And a large percentage of the remainder of the “paid” petitions that the Court grants are indeed very highly paid petitions. They bear, on the petition cover, the name of a member of a tiny cadre of Supreme Court lobbyists–er, extremely highly-paid Supreme Court “specialists”–whose actual specialty is getting the Chamber of Commerce contingent on the Court to read the petition. And, with the exception of very wealthy individuals such as Conrad Black and Jeffrey Skilling,* persons of the non-corporate variety need not, or more accurately, cannot apply.
So, here’s how I illustrate to people of the human type the reality of the clownish formal and de facto rules and customs of this clownish institution: I advise them to take their $6,000 and buy actual lottery tickets with it. Or travel to Las Vegas and have some fun. Or just throw it into the closest large body of water. The Great Lakes here in the upper Midwest would work just fine.
—-
*The Supreme Court granted both Black’s and Skilling’s cert. petitions, filed on their respective behalfs by members of that cadre, commonly known as “the elite Supreme Court bar.” Elite here being a legal term of art meaning “wayyy out the price range of ordinary folk.” Their petitions challenged as unconstitutionally vague a federal criminal statute upon which parts of their indictments were based. They won. In unanimous opinions, if I recall correctly, the Court ruled the statute unconstitutionally vague. And with good reason: it was. But countless others before them surely had challenged that statute as unconstitutionally vague, to no avail. This follows an absolutely institutionalized pattern in that Court.
Bev:
Cost of printing cert petition at one of the houses was ~$3,000. Yes, there are only a few places which do the blue cert petitions. Erwin did it and I paid it. The fees appear to be correct.
Wait. Cert. petitions have white covers. Appellate briefs have blue covers. I think you might be thinking of that. It’s easy now to do those on the (relative) cheap, i.e., print them up yourself and have them bound at Fedex Office or Office Max or wherever, because they’re done on normal-size photocopy/letter-size paper. And the binding doesn’t have to be book-type binding; it can be the common plastic spiral-type binding. In any event, a lot depends on how large the appendix is. In most of the federal appellate courts, you can file a lot fewer appendices than briefs–like 10 copies v. 30 (or whatever). It’s been common for a long time now for cert. petitions to cost in the mid four figures.
Bev:
We filed Cert to SCOTUS and were rejected. What I told you is correct.
Bill
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Yeah, what happened there–you’re right that the printing costs on the cert. petition were less than would normally be the case, for a reason I’d forgotten–is (if I now remember correctly) that the prof. was able to use the law school’s account with the printing co., and therefore get the school’s regular discount there, and then you reimbursed the school.
This reminds me that I should have mentioned another important factor: those (I think) three cert.-petition-printing companies (which of course also specialize in printing appellate briefs) given major discounts to their regular customers; e.g., John Roberts’ old mega law firm, at which he chaired the “Supreme Court Litigation Practice” group, whose clients mostly were multimillion-dollar corporate persons and major trade groups of the Chamber of Commerce variety. The nonprofits, like the ACLU and rightwing “legal foundations,” one of which (the Pacific Legal Foundation) will be arguing a major real-estate-property-”takings” case at the Supreme Court next week, and law school legal clinics that are active in appellate work, also get these discounts.