For a long time, SCOTUS had a great deal of mandatory jurisdiction. Prior to 1976, actions to enjoin enforcement of constitutionally defective federal and state laws were heard by three-judge district courts with direct and mandatory review by SCOTUS. Prior to 1988, SCOTUS had appellate (mandatory) jurisdiction over state court judgments that invalidated federal statutes or upheld state statutes in the face of federal (usually constitutional) challenge. This obviously played some role (how much is an empirical question that I would like to explore someday) in the Court’s docket being significantly larger from the ’60s through the mid-’80s. One way the Court handled that larger docket was through summary and memorandum dispositions (both to affirm and to reverse) of some of these mandatory-jurisdiction cases (again, the numbers are for future exploration).
For now, I am wondering whether the Court’s seemingly increasing practice of summary grant-and-reverse decisions–part of what Will Baude described as the Court’s Shadow Docket and which Richard further discussed–reflects a return to this practice. Monday’s decision