There were only 1,252 paid petitions for certiorari filed with the Supreme Court in October Term 2022. This is well below the average number submitted during the prior five-year and ten-year periods (1,645.8 and 1593.8 respectively), as Michael Migiel-Schwartz notes in an interesting SCOTUSBlog post. Is this a trend?
Migiel-Schwartz writes:
This year's decline is substantial: a 21.2 percent decrease from the previous 15-year average, and a 23.9 percent decrease from the previous five-year average. Even compared with the 2019-20 term's 1,478 petitions, it marks a more than 15 percent decrease. . . .
It is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions based on these numbers alone, and it is possible that the 2022-23 term is a one-year blip. The downturn does not seem to be the result of declining merits decisions in the federal courts of appeals. Although they too have decreased in recent years, that decrease has been slow and fairly steady from 2012 through 2023 — not the sudden drop seen this year in the Supreme Court's paid docket.
Whatever the cause of this term's decline, the average of 1,589 is consistent with a longer-term trend downward noted in 2007 by David Stras. "Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of paid petitions filed with the Court ranged from 1,986 petitions in 1990 to 2,417 petitions in 1981," Stras wrote. "However, beginning in 1994, or at about the time of greatest decline in the Court's plenary docket, the number of paid petitions began to plummet, with only 1,693 paid petitions filed during October Term 2004, a nearly 22% decrease since 1994."
