March is when the country’s top collegiate basketball players — not to mention millions of bracket fillers — get energized for a particularly intense time. (Never mind that March Madness doesn’t end until April.) Although much less known, it’s also a month of special intensity for the Supreme Court.
Testifying in support of then-Associate Justice Patricia Guerrero’s nomination to be California’s chief justice, her colleague Justice Martin Jenkins noted that Guerrero had first arrived at the court “at the busiest time in our court’s term. That’s the period that’s called the March Crush. It’s called that because there are a number of opinions in the cue that are being staged for oral argument and many more to come.”
There are no oral arguments during July and August, and there is apparently a push to get cases on the last four argument calendars of the term — in April, early May, late May, and June. Used to be that there were a ton more arguments on these end-of-term calendars (e.g., in 2016, there were 17 cases over three days in early May). That changed six year ago when the court made a conscious effort to even the size of its calendars, but the last four calendars are still typically a bit heavier than the other seven.
In any event, as explained in the court’s Internal Operating Practices and Procedures (see pp. 33–36 of this booklet), prepping a case for oral argument is a time consuming process — drafting, circulating, revising, re-circulating, and re-revising calendar memoranda. And, with the final four calendars looming, March seems to be a prime period for calendar memo work.
