This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 3rd, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court is on pace to hear a huge number of cases in its next term reversing a recent trend.

I'llia Shapiro, the editor of the Cato Supreme Court Review, comments.

There were a lot of business cases in this last term and as we're talking before you said that there were a lot more environmental cases in the next term. What is what's driving that?

Well this year there weren't any environmental cases, which is perhaps anomalous, though there were some in

previous terms.

Already we're seeing a heightened pace of turn of the millennium, I guess you'd say, certainly more than the 70 and 72 that we've seen in the past.

And an increasing ratio each of the last few years of the Roberts Court, now the Chief Justice

Roberts has been on the court three years,

an increasing percentage are business cases.

Some of them are more controversial,

like the Exxon case this year.

Some of them are less so and are kind of very technical still worth a lot of money

and have a lot of attention to the business community but they're not going to

make page A1 of the New York Times instead they'll make some internal page of

the Wall Street Journal.

Next term we're seeing, as I said, more environmental cases,

more employment cases as well.

We've seen an uptick this year,

and there's going to be more in future.

Just one of the roles that Chief Justice

...