New York Times

Justices to Announce Appeals They Will Hear Without Antonin Scalia

March 1, 2016

by Adam Liptak

Most Fridays during the Supreme Court term, the justices gather in a private conference to decide which appeals they will hear. The odds have always been long: About one in 100 requests for review are granted. With Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the odds just got longer.

It takes four votes to grant a review. But now there are only eight available votes, and simple math suggests that the number of cases on the court’s docket will drop. But math only starts to tell the story. The justices now have reasons to avoid cases that are likely to end in deadlocks. And the four-member conservative bloc that included Justice Scalia now lacks the unilateral power to add cases to the docket.

On Monday morning at 9:30, we will have our first glimpse of this new reality when the court issues orders announcing the results of Friday’s conference, the first since Justice Scalia’s death. Many hundreds of petitioners are hoping the court will hear their cases. But that was always a bad bet, and it just got worse.