Richmond attorney Cullen Seltzer rises to the defense of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Slate:
As proof of the 9th’s judicial failings, the critics generally stress the court’s extra-high rate of review and reversal by the Supreme Court. The numbers, though, tell a less damning story than the alarmist portrayals of the court. . . .
yes, 9th Circuit cases were disproportionately represented in the Supreme Court. Since caseload and population would predict a review rate of 18 percent to 20 percent, the justices heard between one and a half times and twice as many cases from the 9th as would have been expected. But because the Supreme Court’s docket is small, the number of “extra” cases from the 9th is also small: nine for the last term. That’s a substantial part of the Supreme Court’s docket, which totaled 73 cases last year, 64 of them from the federal courts of appeals. But nine cases represents only 0.1 percent of the 9th Circuit’s 6,387 on-the-merits decisions for the 12 months ending in September of 2006. That’s a fair measure of judges going nutty only if you think that 0.1 percent is statistically interesting. . . .
let’s look at how often the Supreme Court decides that the 9th got it wrong. Last term, the Supreme Court’s reversal rate for 9th Circuit cases was 90.5 percent. Yikes