This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 24th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The docket for the U.S. Supreme Court is coming into clearer focus.

Ilia Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of the Cato Institute's Supreme Court review, gives us a look

at this court's past and future. Well now we have a full understanding of what cases are going to make up the October

turn 2007, as it's called.

It's kind of a court follows an academic year as it were.

The courts granted 74 cases to be heard. Two have already been dismissed before argument. Four of those

were pushed to next years and you got to add in one that's what's called

original jurisdiction, one state suing another that the Supreme Court hears directly

and one on a special kind of appellate jurisdiction.

So we have in total 70 arguments, which is a record low, one less than last year.

Some of the highlights so far, there's been a couple of election law cases,

one out of Washington State, one out of New York about the election of judges,

and what kind of control parties have over their primaries.

There's been the Stone Ridge case, which we talked about last week, which is one of the biggest

securities law cases in decades.

Narrowing or holding narrow the types of claims that investors can bring, namely

that they can't sue third parties that might have been involved with violators of securities laws.

A significant opinion that, another significant opinion that came out was in the Gaul and

Kimbrough cases.

Those are about sentencing and they continued the Booker line of

...