SCOCAblog, the online publication of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law and of the UC Law Journal, takes a detailed look at the California Supreme Court in 2025, covering topics including productivity, promptness, voting blocs, and opinion length.
This is the report’s overview:
This year it’s apparent that the California Supreme Court has settled into a new normal. As our results show, over the past five years the court’s metrics in general have been rather consistent. Opinion counts remain low, unanimity has fallen to more familiar levels, straight grants are flat, civil cases continue to dominate the docket, and reversals are still the predominant result. This suggests that the court has moved out of the transition phase we posited in last year’s review and that the current trends may be durable. Here we also investigate the possibility we raised last year of an emerging situation-dependent 5–2 or three-way split among the justices. Our analysis shows some support for a contextual three-way split: Liu–Evans, Kruger–Groban–Jenkins, and Guerrero–Corrigan. But the better evidence is for Liu–Evans as a consistent bloc in criminal and capital cases, and the best evidence is for Justice Liu as a one-man separate-opinion machine.
We count opinions by court term, instead of calendar year as SCOCAblog does, and have said that the 45 decisions in the 2024–2025 term “might be lowest ever for the court.” SCOCAblog disagrees, saying that 2025’s 48 court opinions were not the least ever and that “the only other year in the last century when the court decided fewer than 50 cases was in 1987 (37 decisions).” We haven’t checked 1987 statistics ourselves, but Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court of California Resources has what seems to be an authoritative list of 61 opinions for the 1987 calendar year. (See here, here, and here.)
Related:
The 2024–2025 term in numbers — the 45 opinions
The 2024–2025 term in numbers — the conferences
“Why we’re not worried about SCOCA productivity”
“SCOCA is spending more time writing fewer and longer decisions”
