The Solicitor General\u27s Changing Role in Supreme Court Litigation

Over the last two decades, as the Supreme Court has sharply cut back its case load, the Solicitor General has wielded the tremendous influence that comes with being the Court’s most frequent and successful litigant in new ways. In this Article, the authors examine both the causes and consequences of these changes, which have diminished the Solicitor General’s role at the certiorari stage and expanded it at the merits stage. They find that at the certiorari stage, when the Court is selecting its cases and setting its agenda, the Solicitor General is now seeking certiorari in so few cases—just fifteen per Term—that the Solicitor General is ceding the federal government’s once-substantial influence over the Court’s agenda-setting to more aggressive litigants. At the merits stage, in contrast, the Solicitor General is now participating in over three-quarters of the Court’s cases, and is doing so more frequently as amicus curiae than as a party. The authors address concerns that, with this nearly pervasive involvement, the Solicitor General may have become too intrusive in private litigation or too partisan in cases presenting high-profile, socially controversial issues. They find, however, that solicitors general have acted within their proper constitutional role, largely confining involvement as amicus to cases that directly and substantially affect the federal government’s institutional interests

Setting the Social Agenda: Deciding to Review High-Profile Cases at the Supreme Court

This is the published version

The Philosophy of Certiorari: Jurisprudential Considerations in Supreme Court Case Selection

In this Article, we offer a fuller jurisprudential analysis of the gatekeeping choices that the Justices make as they set the direction in which the Court will proceed. Using more recent data that we gathered from the docket books of Justices Brennan and Marshall, we show that rule-based and strategic factors, while undeniably important, cannot adequately account for the Justices’ voting behavior at the certiorari stage. Although the Justices consider the very same cases and materials, in light of the same criteria set out in the Court’s rule, they come to quite different conclusions about which cases merit plenary review. Even Justices closely aligned in decisions on the merits often have dramatically different voting records on certiorari. We suggest that other, more jurisprudential considerations also affect the individual Justices’ judgments about the quantity and content of the Court’s proper workload. In particular, we contend that a Justice’s views about what role the Supreme Court should play in the judicial system and American life—including his or her views on the nature of precedent, the importance of uniformity in federal law, and the Court’s appropriate role in effectuating social change—play a central role in shaping his or her decisions about case selection

Consumer Financial Protection in the COVID-19 Crisis: An Emergency Agenda

The coronavirus pandemic is creating overwhelming needs, in three waves. First is the health crisis; second is the macroeconomic crisis created by the abrupt halt in much business activity; and now third is a consumer crisis, as households are faced with total or partial job loss, sharp income decline, and potential loss of health care. Millions of Americans are falling behind on their bills, including major obligations like mortgages, rent, car payments, and other forms of household debt. At the same time, they face a financial industry itself struggling to respond to the compounding crises and widespread confusion as to what the new rules of the road are as financial institutions, states, localities, and the federal government scramble to respond. The result is fertile ground for consumer scams. The authors call upon the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to recognize and respond to this new consumer crisis, providing an action plan of more than a dozen practical steps that the CFPB can and must take immediately to prevent widespread consumer harm. The action plan starts with the most basic and essential step of collecting and disseminating timely and accurate information for both consumers and policymakers. The CFPB must address pressing consumer risks in four primary areas: foreclosure prevention, non-mortgage debt forbearance, oversight of debt collectors, and supervision of credit reporting companies. In each of these primary areas, and on all the issues discussed in this paper, the CFPB must use all of its authorities to ensure that crucial relief is delivered to distressed consumers

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Keynote Address

Richard Cordray served for six years as the first Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by a bipartisan vote of the Senate. During his tenure, the Bureau returned over $12 billion to 30 million Americans, handled 1.3 million consumer complaints that resolved many individual problems, and adopted new rules to safeguard the mortgage market that caused the financial crisis of 2008 and the deep recession that followed. He is the author of Watchdog, released in March 2020, about consumer protection and the role and importance of the CFPB. Before joining the Consumer Bureau, Rich served as Ohio’s Attorney General, where he and his team recovered over$2 billion for Ohio’s retirees, investors, and business owners and took major steps to protect consumers from fraudulent foreclosures and financial predators. He also served as Ohio Treasurer, where he led the State’s banking, investment, debt, and financing activities. He previously taught at Ohio State’s law school and served as a state legislator and as Ohio’s first Solicitor General. Rich has argued seven cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including by special appointment of both the Clinton and Bush Justice Departments. Rich graduated from Michigan State University’s James Madison College, Oxford University in England, and the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He lives in Grove City, Ohio with his wife Peggy, a law professor at Capital University Law School, and twin children Danny and Holly