If you’re not interested in how many opinions the California Supreme Court filed in 1987, you can stop reading now.
If you are interested, join us as we recount and add to the major dispute between At The Lectern and SCOCAblog. Yes, “major dispute” is definitely flippant and melodramatic.
Here’s the recap:
It all started when we said that the 45 opinions the court issued during the 2024–2025 term “might be lowest ever for the court.” SOCAblog responded in their review of the court’s 2025 year (we look at terms — from September 1 to August 31 — while SCOCAblog analyzes calendar years, but that’s not relevant here, nor does it make much of a difference for any purposes) 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).”
Then, in reporting on the SCOCAblog review, we said that “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.”
Last week, SCOCAblog updated the language in their annual review and added a new post clarifying that their count (now revised to 38 from 37) was “focusing on . . . majority opinions, not cases decided by any means” and reporting that in 1987, while there were 38 majority opinions, there were also 24 per curiam opinions. (A total of 62 because SCOCAblog found one case that Stanford’s Resources didn’t have.) They explained, “SCOCAblog’s annual tally focuses on merits decisions by majority opinion. That’s the critical factor for our comparative analysis because majority opinions are the current benchmark and because those are the common factor between present and past courts.”
But . . . .
If you’re looking at the court’s annual (or term) “opinion output,” as SCOCAblog phrases it, you should include per curiam opinions in the count. Most of 1987’s 24 per curiams were full opinions and probably took amounts of time and court resources equivalent to the time and resources expended on opinions attributed to an individual justice author. They were thus very much a part of the court’s opinion output for that year.
Most of the 1987 per curiam opinions — 22 of the 24 — were in State Bar disciplinary or admission matters or (a few) in judicial disciplinary cases. Opinions in those types of cases were historically per curiam, not just in 1987. There aren’t nearly as many per curiams nowadays because, first, the court grants review very rarely in attorney disciplinary cases (the court has discretionary review now (see rule 9.16); maybe review was mandatory back around 1987) and, second, when it does grant review, the opinions for about the last 25 years have usually not been per curiam (see recently here).
We do agree with SCOCAblog’s conclusion: “That we’re having this discussion at all is the real headline, and aside from whether the recent year was the least or second-least productive of this century (or ever), the takeaway is that the court’s output is historically low and looks set to go even lower by anyone’s count.” (See also here.)
