Over the past few years, the Supreme Court was six times more likely to accept cases from an elite group of 66 lawyers than it was from more than 99 percent of those who petitioned the court. That's the finding of a recent Reuters special report called "The Echo Chamber." It illustrates how almost half the appeals accepted by the court over a nine-year period came from this cadre of elite lawyers--many of whom have personal connections to the nine justices.
Dahlia LithwickEven Merrick Garland can't get up and give a press conference in which he says, "Give me a damn vote." We just hear silence.
Dahlia LithwickOn a court full of great writers, I shouldn't say full of - there have been some bad writers on the court over the years.
Dahlia LithwickThere's such a kind of complicated line between politics and the law and we don't sit around and say, hey, you know, what would Oliver Wendell Holmes have had to say to this.
Dahlia LithwickI wonder if there's just a sense that we have nothing to learn from any Supreme Court justice, including the great Chief Justice John Marshall.
Dahlia LithwickFor the most part, much of the legal world's attention has been focused on Donald Trump and his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who is currently presiding over the Trump University fraud cases in California. Trump somehow managed to offend surprising numbers of establishment Republicans.
Dahlia Lithwick