Tag Archives: oral argument

Supreme Court Oral Argument Audio Recordings

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This from SCOTUS Blog:

“Starting next week, the Court will release on its own website the audiotape recordings of all of the arguments at the end of each argument week. This will be much faster release than under the prior policy, when they were not available for months — unless, as in a few high-profile cases, the Court released them on the same day of argument — a policy now discontinued.”

Starting with the October Term 2010, visitors to the Supreme Court site can download the FREE MP3 files by clicking on the “Oral Arguments” link from the home page and then clicking on the “Argument Audio”.  The argument audio will be posted on Fridays after Conference.

More details about this new policy are available in the Supreme Court’s press release.

Source of Information or ‘Dog and Pony Show’?: Judicial Information Seeking During U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument, 1963-1965 & 2004-2009

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Source of Information or ‘Dog and Pony Show’?: Judicial Information Seeking During U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument, 1963-1965 & 2004-2009

by James Cleith Phillips (University of California, Berkeley – School of Law) and Edward Carter (Brigham Young University)

Santa Clara Law Review, Vol. 50, pp. 101-203, 2010

Abstract:

Scholars and lawyers have long debated what role, if any, oral argument plays in the U.S. Supreme Court‘s decision-making process. While some have attempted anecdotally to determine whether or not Justices use oral argument to gather information in order to decide a case, few have attempted to investigate oral argument empirically. Additionally, no scholar to date has specifically measured the levels of information-seeking behavior during oral argument of individual Justices. Finally, there have been few studies attempting to quantitatively compare oral argument behavior in different time periods. This study attempts to address such deficiencies in Supreme Court scholarship.

Source: LSN Experimental & Empirical Studies Abstracts, Vol. 10, No. 84: Oct 12, 2009