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Welcome to the Advisory Opinion Podcast. I'm David French with Sarah Isger and we've got some good stuff for you today.

We're going to start off with some Supreme Court statistics from the most recent term, some interesting stuff there.

We're going to have a good conversation with Hiram Sasser, a guest from the First Liberty Institute who is co-counsel in the Coach Kennedy case.

I promise you, we've kept teasing some other topics and we're going to deal with those.

Many of them with our next guest that we've got coming up after this podcast. We've got good guests coming in future podcasts.

But for now, we're going to stick with a couple of big topics and Sarah, let's start with stats.

So thank you to Scotus Blog for their annual stat pack. This is for the October term 2021.

And we'll put it in the show notes so you can go read it all yourself. It's 28 pages. So we're not going to be able to cover every single thing in it.

But we're noting at the top what isn't included in the Scotus Blog stat pack. So for example, it's 66 cases that were designated as formal opinions of the court.

That's incredibly low. First of all, the numbers overall keep going down. We'll get to that. But it does not include those shadow docket cases, David.

And on the one hand, maybe those were a bigger deal when we were getting all of the COVID shadow docket. But for example, it's not going to include the OSHA vaccine mandate case because that was a shadow docket case.

So lots of interesting things, never the less of the 66, although again, I just feel like I have to put an asterisk because it's like, well, a lot of those shadow docket cases had opinions.

And I don't know, you could imagine including those in some other way, but just of the 66 non shadow docket cases.

These are the key findings from Scotus Blog, some of which I just think are worth a combo. The client of unanimity is their number one only 29% of cases were decided unanimously.

The lowest rate of unanimity in the two decades that they've been tracking the statistic. And David, this one's interesting to me because this is something John Roberts wanted to emphasize in his time as Chief Justice.

He wanted to have as narrow decisions as possible to maximize unanimity because he thought that would be good for the institution of the court and sort of lower the temperature on the politicalization of the court by having more unanimous decisions, only 29%.

Yeah, it's very interesting that we're down to the 29% but he, I think the bottom line series, he just doesn't have the power anymore to engineer the nine zeros because he's not the swing vote anymore him.

If he decides to sort of withhold his vote or if he decides that you're going to only get my vote if we get as super majority, well, you don't need it so much because that gets to the next statistic, the rise of the six three court.

We have about 30% 19 decisions or 30% were six three so you had more six three decisions than you had unanimous decisions and of those 1914 repolarized in which all six Republican appointed justices were in the majority.

No, so that's Roberts joining there with in that, but he just doesn't have the power.

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