This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 6, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

At the halfway point in the Supreme Court's term, can anything meaningful be read

into the court's decisions or the cases it has agreed to hear thus far.

Billius Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

Well, we're about halfway through chronologically.

The docket is filled out.

There are now 79 cases on the docket.

75 of them are cert grants, and there's two that are appellate

jurisdiction, two that are original. A few of those will probably be kicked

forward to the next term so we'll likely end up with around 75 opinions

which is roughly 10 more than last year. so we'll likely end up with around 75 opinions,

which is roughly 10 more than last year.

So the court might have heard some of the criticism

about being lazy and needing to do more work.

There have been 16 opinions issued after arguments so far.

Not surprisingly, 10 of them were unanimous.

The court likes to get out of the way the so-called easy cases early on.

Only three, five, four splits so far.

I'll briefly go into those.

The first one is Herring versus United States. This is a Fourth Amendment case that decided

that the exclusionary rule doesn't necessarily apply to a search that's incident to an arrest based on an erroneous warrant

...