SCOTUS justices should reveal their votes on cert petitions, law prof argues
The U.S. Supreme Court should announce the vote tallies when it accepts or rejects cert petitions, a law professor argues.
Writing in the New York Times, Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher argues that the court should “lift the veil of secrecy that shrouds” its decisions to hear cases by announcing how each justice votes on each cert petition.
The court gets about 8,000 cert petitions each year, but only about 75 cases are selected for hearing.
“These votes are more consequential than anything said at oral argument,” Fisher writes. “If some justices regularly vote to hear appeals from corporations and never from employees, the public ought to know this. If others often vote to hear petitions from civil rights groups but never from state or local governments defending their policies, the public should know this, too.”
