Law Professor Stephen Wermiel has a great post over at SCOTUSblog on what happens at the Supreme Court during the summer. Professor Wermiel notes that:
In recent years, the Court has received between 7500 and 8000 cert. petitions per year: from July 2011 to July 2012, for example, 7712 new petitions were filed. There were 7857 in the same period from July 2010 to July 2011 and 8159 the year before that.
The challenge in sorting through the petitions is that the Court is only deciding about seventy-five of these cases each Term – that is, about one percent of the total. So how does the Court identify the one percent to be decided and the ninety-nine percent to be turned down?
For anyone interested in the work of the Court during the summer months, Professor Wermiel’s post is an easy-to-read explanation of what occurs.