Yesterday's Cleveland Plain Dealer featured an extensive article on the increasingly slow pace of decisions at the Ohio Supreme Court. In 2004 it took the Court an average of five months from oral argument to issue an opinion. By 2006, it took an average of seven months.
Chief Justice Thomas Moyer, who is reluctant to talk about the inner workings of the court, acknowledges that the pace has been a rising concern for him and a source of finger-pointing among the justices. But he says it's an issue that he - despite his leadership position - is helpless to control.
"Any justice who has a pattern of taking a longer period of time than others knows the court's concern, they know the chief justice's concern, they know the concern of their colleagues," Moyer said.
"But one thing we have to remember is each of the justices is an independently statewide elected official."
The Miss. supreme court has picked up the pace under its present chief justice, and one reason may be that they seldom hear oral arguments any more. At a CLE seminar, the chief explained that, basically, they don't grant oral argument unless either (1) it's a constitutional or capital issue or (2) the briefs are too bad for them to figure out what the hell the case is about.
I wonder how long the Ohio figure would be stretched out if the yardstick ran not to "final opinion" but to "mandate." My state's high court is plagued by near-frivolous motions for rehearing that usually drag the mandate out several more months.
I don't understand your point. How is the slow pace of the court a function of its politics? (Or a function of judicial elections?)
JHA
A common failure of legal thinking is the tendency to issue condemnations of others based on a comparison of their achievements to nothing more than ones own personally-fabricated ideals about how things should be, with no evidence, let alone proof, that these ideals have ever been achieved anywhere, or are even possible to achieve, by anyone.
The information provided in this post provides no basis whatsoever for any particular expectation about how long judges should take between oral argument and decision. Accordingly, there is no basis here for having any opinion at all about whether Ohio's Supreme Court Justices are performing well or badly. A claim that this information can support an opion is nothing more than an illustration of inferential fallacy.