Cordray Publishes Article on Supreme Court Calendar

July 29, 2004

Capital University Law School Professor Margaret M. Cordray has published a law review article entitled The Calendar of the Justices: How the Supreme Court’s Timing Affects its Decisionmaking. It appears at 36 Arizona State Law Journal 183 (2004).

In researching and writing the article, Professor Cordray, and co-author Richard Cordray, collected and analyzed new data on how the distribution of the U.S. Supreme Court’s workload over the course of a typical term affects the Court’s performance in evaluating petitions for certiorari and in resolving cases on the merits.

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, the data on the relationship between the Court’s work production and its calendar demonstrates a remarkable consistency in the Court’s treatment of cases heard on the merits, regardless of whether they were heard early or late in the term,” said Professor Cordray. “The data, however, does reveal striking fluctuations in the Court’s rate of granting petitions for certiorari.”

The article contends that the Court could largely eliminate these fluctuations, which recur systematically but are unrelated to the merits of the petitions, by making certain changes to its calendar and other aspects of its internal administration.

Professor Cordray was a judicial clerk for the Honorable Kenneth W. Starr on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Before coming to Capital in 1992, she practiced with the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C., and worked in the Office of Legal Affairs at The Ohio State University. She teaches Contracts, Evidence, Remedies, and a seminar on the Supreme Court. Professor Cordray is a graduate of the University of the Pacific, Balt Hall School of Law at the University of California Berkeley and Oxford University.

Professor Cordray’s other articles on the Supreme Court include, “The Supreme Court's Plenary Docket,” 58 Washington & Lee Law Review 737 (2001) with Richard A. Cordray; and “Settlement Agreements and the Supreme Court,” 48 Hastings Law Journal 9 (1996).