Supreme Court to Start Slow Next Term After Monumental Finale

The US Supreme Court is set to kick off its next term with a slow start, a trend that’s likely to continue through the end of the year.

The justices will hear six cases when their next term starts in October, according to a calendar released Friday, including a major challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism.

The justices have historically heard two case per day, meaning they have 10 slots available for the two-week sitting, which includes a federal holiday. However, the justices currently have just 21 cases available for the first three sittings of their term from October to December.

That’s low compared to recent terms, where the justices have had more than 40 cases available to start their term.

And while the justices will add additional cases once they return from their summer recess, the current level of cases continues a downward trend in the number the Supreme Court hears and resolves each term, which runs from roughly October to June.

The court’s current 21 available cases “is very low by historical standards,” and “barring unusual measures these will be the only cases that the Justices will hear in the October, November, and December sittings,” said Latham & Watkins’ Roman Martinez.

Trending Downward

In the term that ended June 30, the justices handed down fewer than 60 opinions in argued cases. Though many those cases had major implications for affirmative action, student loans, and LGBTQ rights, it is well below the roughly 70 signed opinions in argued cases it has averaged since Chief Justice John Roberts took the helm in 2005, according to Adam Feldman, the creator of the blog Empirical SCOTUS.

Since that time, the Supreme Court’s caseload in argued cases has trended downward. In contrast, the justices have been deciding more requests on the emergency, or “shadow,” docket.

It’s possible—though rare—that the justices could add additional cases over the summer, Martinez said. But unless those cases are expedited, they won’t get scheduled for argument until January 2024 at the earliest.

The next scheduled opportunity for the justice to grant additional cases for the 2023 term will come at the end of September during the court’s “long conference.” The court typically grants a large number of cases out of that conference, since it considers all the cases that have been piling up over the summer recess.

It feels like the court is being “just as selective as ever and doesn’t need to grant for the sake of granting more cases,” said SCOTUS veteran William Jay of Goodwin.

Among the other cases that the justices scheduled for their first sitting of the upcoming term is a case about the consideration of race when drawing voting districts.