Leah Spero and Max Bilsborough write on SCOCAblog, the online publication of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law and of the UC Law Journal.
For case argued during the 2023-2024 term, they found that civil cases took about 12.5 months from party briefing completion until oral argument and non-capital criminal cases took about nine months. Also, the time between the court’s sending of its oral argument letter and the calendaring of the case was 58 days for civil cases and 68 days for non-capital criminal cases.
Because the court typically gives the bare minimum 20 days’ notice that a case has been scheduled for argument, Spero and Bilsborough advise counsel “to begin their oral argument preparation once they receive the preliminary notification letter, to avoid a time crunch when the court announces the argument calendar.”
The study’s authors used average times for the cases they reviewed, excluding two outliers at the top and bottom of the ranges. (They also excluded all habeas, capital, juvenile, and dependency cases.) They said that “including those outliers skewed our results enough that we have better confidence in presenting averages that exclude them.” Instead of using averages, perhaps better (or similar) results could have been obtained by including the outliers and reporting the times for the median case.
Related:
Our February list of the oldest non-capital cases on the Supreme Court’s docket, some of which have since been argued.
