“What’s Taking the Supreme Court So Long?”

I’ve written this piece for The Daily Beast.  It begins:

With everyone anxiously awaiting potentially blockbuster decisions on issues from affirmative action to voting rights to same-sex marriage, it is easy to criticize the Supreme Court for being too slow.

After all, Fisher, the affirmative-action case involving the University of Texas, was argued in Supreme Court back in October. By historical standards, the court is deciding very few cases: it issued 167 with opinions in the 1981 term, but is expected to decide only 77 this term. Why save all of the big calls for the end? Are the justices trying to create maximum suspense to get more attention?

These criticisms fundamentally misunderstand both the modern Supreme Court’s mission and the psychology of the justices. There may be a lot of reasons to criticize the court, but the end-of-the-term crunch is not one of them.

See also this piece by Joan Biskupic on end of term drama, and listen to the last three minutes of this Nina Totenberg report for NPR which describes a clearly stressed chief justice.

I thought this was perhaps the least controversial oped I have ever written, and yet Andrew Cohen tweets: “I disagree with nearly every word of this.” He further explains: “I don’t think we should be celebrating fact that Supreme Court is going to dump 15% of the Term on us in 2 or 3 days. Will diffuse coverage.”  [UPDATE: Here’s Andrew’s fuller take.]

My view, as expressed in the Beast piece: “It is easy to see why, in the most difficult cases, this process can take time. If we want our justices to be deliberative, comprehensive, careful, and transparent, we should celebrate, not bemoan, the fact that the hardest opinions come at the end.”

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