Sunday's New York Times featured an extensive profile of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The article contained one interesting tidbit about the PennEast case. Otherwise the article offered relatively little that was new. It did, however, provide plenty of material for the gristmill.
A key portion of the article summarizes a preliminary analysis of Justice Barrett's voting record over her first three-and-a-half terms on the Court. That's not much to go on, but it allows for the editors to include some pretty graphs and provides the basis for over-confident assessments of trends in Justice Barrett's jurisprudence.
As longtime readers know, I believe Court watchers place too much weight on individual terms, none of which (in isolation) is ever representative of the Court's overall work. Over time we often see significant vacillation in the percentage of cases decided by any particular margin and rate at which particular justices agree with each other or join the majority. In OT2022 over 45 percent of the Court's decisions were unanimous. Yet only one year before the percentage of unanimous opinions was only 29 percent. The only thing that really changed between these terms was the Court's mix of cases.
