Cert Pool - Criticisms

Criticisms

The cert pool remedies several problems, but creates others.

Memos prepared for an audience of nine cannot, by definition, be as candid as private communications within chambers; moreover, they must be written in far more general terms.
The fate of a petition may be disproportionately affected by which clerk writes the pool memo:

pool memos should ideally be balanced and nonideological. But my memory is that it mattered a great deal which case wound up with which clerk. For example, a hard-luck petition by a death-row inmate was likely to get a far more sympathetic hearing in a more liberal chambers than it would in a more conservative chambers . . . On the other hand, a messy regulatory takings petition was far more likely to get a thorough airing if it happened to land on the desk of a clerk in a conservative chambers. —

Prof. Douglas A. Berman has argued that the cert pool substantially weights the preponderance of capital cases on the court's docket.
Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog has argued that the cert pool is partially responsible for the Court's shrunken (by historical standards) docket.

Famous quotes containing the word criticisms:

“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
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“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”
—William James (1842–1910)