Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-sotomayor-and-the-supreme-courts-certiorari-process
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 04:19:43+00:00

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The Supreme Court’s certiorari process is generally a black box. Occasionally, however, Justices issue statements explaining their dissent from or concurrence in the denial of certiorari. Since she joined the Court, Justice Sotomayor has produced more of these statements than any of her colleagues. In this Essay, Robert Yablon considers what Justice Sotomayor’s certiorari-stage writings reveal about her substantive passions and her vision of the Supreme Court’s institutional responsibilities. Nearly all of Justice Sotomayor’s statements decry instances in which the criminal justice system failed to deliver on its promise of ethical and evenhanded justice, whether due to structural defects or individual transgressions on the part of prosecutors or courts. The author suggests that, were the Court to recalibrate its docket along the lines Justice Sotomayor’s writings advocate, the Court could improve the functioning of the legal system as well as its own institutional standing.
For the most part, the outside world does not even know which petitions garner serious attention. At their conferences, the Justices actively consider only those petitions that at least one Justice specifically asks to have placed on the so-called “discuss” list.4 That list, however, is not publicly released. Careful Court-watchers can sometimes infer from the issuance of certain obscure procedural orders that a petition has caught the attention of someone at the Court.5 But even in these instances, it is usually impossible to discern whose interest has been piqued and why.
A handful of times each year, however, a Justice cracks open the black box of the certiorari process and issues an explanatory statement respecting the denial of certiorari. These statements, which run anywhere from one or two paragraphs to many pages, take two primary forms: a dissent from the denial of certiorari or a concurrence in the denial. In a dissent, the author explains why she believes certiorari should have been granted. In a concurrence, the author typically expresses interest in or concern about a lower court’s handling of a particular issue, but then identifies some obstacle to plenary review, such as the petitioner’s failure to have properly preserved the issue below.
Dissents from and concurrences in the denial of certiorari provide an especially good window into Justice Sotomayor’s early tenure on the Supreme Court. They reveal a Justice who is deeply engaged in the Court’s agenda-setting function and willing to share her perspective with her colleagues, legal professionals, and the public. They also give a sense of her substantive passions and priorities and her views on the institutional role of the Supreme Court in overseeing lower courts and the legal profession.
One striking aspect of Justice Sotomayor’s statements respecting the denial of certiorari is their relative frequency. In her first four full Terms on the Court, Justice Sotomayor issued ten such statements—more than any of her colleagues.7 Her closest competitors during that four-year stretch were Justice Scalia and Justice Alito, each of whom issued eight statements. Justice Thomas, with five, was the only other member of the Court to author even half as many. Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer each issued four, the Chief Justice three, and Justice Kennedy one. Now in the middle of her fourth Term on the Court, Justice Kagan has yet to issue any statement respecting the denial of certiorari.
While Justices who refrain from issuing statements respecting the denial of certiorari still may be active participants in the certiorari process, an abundance of statements is an affirmative indication of engagement. Each time Justice Sotomayor felt strongly enough to issue a statement, she almost certainly played a central role in the Court’s deliberations. And these are likely not the only occasions when Justice Sotomayor vigorously advocated for certiorari. Instances in which she may have successfully shepherded a case onto the Court’s docket remain hidden from view, as do instances in which she may have strongly supported granting certiorari but was not sufficiently troubled by the Court’s denial to issue a public statement.
The nature of the cases in which Justice Sotomayor has issued statements provides further evidence of her deep certiorari-stage engagement. All but one of the cases came from the in forma pauperis portion of the Court’s docket.12 These are petitions for certiorari submitted by petitioners who, for reasons of economic hardship, are exempted from the Court’s filing fee and excused from complying with the Court’s usual requirements for the formatting of petitions.13 Though there are exceptions (for instance, a number of the petitions are filed by skilled federal public defenders), the quality of the advocacy in these petitions often is not high. Many are submitted pro se. They are sometimes written out by hand. Even the counseled petitions sometimes show little regard for the norms of Supreme Court advocacy. Numerically speaking, in forma pauperis petitions account for the vast majority of the petitions the Court receives—some seventy-five to eighty percent.14 Yet, in most years, they account for less than twenty percent of the Court’s grants of certiorari.15 Much of this disparity no doubt derives from the failure of most in forma pauperis petitions to present the sort of legal issue that would even arguably warrant Supreme Court review. But the widespread deficiencies of in forma pauperis petitions mean that they are also the petitions in which serious issues can most easily escape notice. It takes a good eye and keen attention to detail to repeatedly pluck needles from the in forma pauperis haystack.
In terms of substance, Justice Sotomayor has focused her certiorari-stage writing on issues pertaining to the criminal justice system. Every one of her statements addresses a petition for certiorari that presents questions of criminal procedure,16 habeas corpus,17 or the rights of prisoners.18 Other symposium participants are offering perspectives on Justice Sotomayor’s criminal procedure jurisprudence.19 For present purposes, it suffices to observe that the attention Justice Sotomayor has devoted to criminal matters at the certiorari stage identifies this as an area of real substantive passion and one in which she plays an especially active part in shaping the Court’s agenda. Her background as a former prosecutor—Justice Alito is the only one other one on the Court—and as the Court’s only former district court judge makes her a natural for this role. She can speak with the authority of someone who has participated in the day-to-day, on-the-ground functioning of the criminal justice system.
It appears, however, that something more than an affinity for criminal-law issues animates Justice Sotomayor’s certiorari-stage writings. Her statements reveal a Justice who has a distinctive vision of the Court’s institutional responsibilities. The petitions that capture her attention and motivate her to break the Court’s usual certiorari-stage silence are, by and large, ones in which the legal system failed to deliver on the promise of ethical and evenhanded justice, whether due to structural defects or individual transgressions. By directing attention to these cases, Justice Sotomayor’s implicit message is that, when the legal system breaks down, the Supreme Court, as the nation’s court of last resort, has a duty to step in.
Many of Justice Stevens’s statements respecting the denial of certiorari addressed similar issues and themes, which bolsters the view that Justice Sotomayor may have stepped in to fill an institutional gap that opened when Justice Stevens departed. Several members of the Court—particularly Justices Scalia and Alito—regularly produce certiorari-stage writings that highlight instances in which they believe lower courts improperly granted relief to criminal defendants, habeas petitioners, or prisoners.20 In the years leading up to his retirement, Justice Stevens was the only member of the Court who routinely used certiorari-stage writings to direct attention to cases in which relief may have been improperly denied, particularly in capital cases.21 It is now Justice Sotomayor whose statements provide a counterweight to those of her more conservative colleagues.
Justice Sotomayor’s pattern of advocating certiorari in cases such as these suggests that she balances the Court’s usual certiorari factors a bit differently than some of her colleagues. A non-exclusive list of reasons for granting certiorari appears in Supreme Court Rule 10. In practice, most cases that end up on the Supreme Court’s merits docket are ones in which a federal court of appeals or state high court has decided a question of federal law “in a way that conflicts with a decision” from another such court.46 Most of the rest are cases that involve no conflict among lower courts but present contentious legal issues of great national significance. Justice Sotomayor no doubt considers the resolution of such cases to be a vital part of the Supreme Court’s work. But she appears more willing than some of her colleagues to invoke Rule 10’s less frequently cited justifications for certiorari. Rule 10 provides that plenary review may be appropriate not only when a case implicates a split of authority or raises one of the major issues of the day, but also when a federal appellate court “has so far departed from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings, or sanctioned such a departure by a lower court, as to call for an exercise of this Court’s supervisory power,”47 or when a state or federal court “has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with relevant decisions of [the Supreme] Court.”48 In recent years, the Court has tended to rely on these grounds mainly when summarily reversing decisions favorable to criminal defendants and habeas petitioners.49 Based on her writings, it seems fair to say that Justice Sotomayor would like to see the Court focus attention not just on cases prosecutors should not have lost, but also on cases they should not have won, at least when it appears that failing to intervene would allow a serious injustice to go uncorrected.
Would the Court do well to recalibrate its docket along the lines Justice Sotomayor seems to favor? Skeptics might trot out the oft-repeated mantra that the Supreme Court “is not a court of error correction” and argue that, given its limited bandwidth, it is more important for the Court to focus on resolving splits of authority and to intervene in only the most high-profile national legal debates.50 But, as just noted, the current Court’s disdain for error correction is selective. In a steady trickle of cases, the Court has been granting certiorari and summarily reversing decisions favorable to criminal defendants and habeas petitioners.51 These rulings send a message to lower courts—sometimes implicitly and sometimes overtly—that relief to criminal defendants, and especially to habeas petitioners, should be granted sparingly.52 Deciding more cases of the sort that Justice Sotomayor has chosen to highlight in her certiorari-stage writings might help to restore a sense of balance. Such review would impress upon lower courts that errors in criminal cases can run in both directions and that relief should not be reflexively denied.
Whether or not Justice Sotomayor ends up persuading her colleagues to take up cases like the ones her certiorari-stage writings address, those writings may themselves produce at least some of the benefits of plenary review. They serve to remind courts and government officials of their professional obligations. They inform attorneys and policymakers about issues that may warrant attention.55 And they assure litigants and the public that one of the country’s most prominent jurists is carefully scrutinizing the petitions that cross her desk in an effort to ensure that justice is done.
Robert Yablon is a senior associate at Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLC in Washington, D.C. He clerked for Justice Sotomayor during her first Term on the Supreme Court and for Justice Ginsburg during the preceding Term. The author is grateful to Brian Goldman, Daniel Habib, and Miriam Seifter for their thoughtful comments during the development of this Essay. The author also thanks his co-panelists at the Yale Law Journal Forum’s symposium, Andrew Pincus and Kathleen Sullivan, for their helpful insights, and the Yale Law Journal editors for their excellent editorial work.
Preferred citation: Robert M. Yablon, Justice Sotomayor and the Supreme Court’s Certiorari Process, 123 Yale L.J. F. 551 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-sotomayor-and-the-supreme-courts-certiorari-process.
Cf. H.W. Perry, Deciding to Decide: Agenda Setting in the United States Supreme Court (1991).
See, e.g., Cordray & Cordray, supra note 3, at 398-99; Watts, supra note 3, at 15-16.
See Eugene Gressman et al., Supreme Court Practice 548 (9th ed. 2007).
See id. at 549 n.4.
See id. at 550 n.6.
131 S. Ct. 8 (2010).
Frequently Asked Questions, Sup. Ct. of the U.S., http://www.supremecourt.gov/faq.aspx (last visited Mar. 13, 2014).
A number of scholars have offered detailed descriptions of the mechanics of the certiorari process. See, e.g., Margaret Meriwether Cordray & Richard Cordray, The Philosophy of Certiorari: Jurisprudential Considerations in Supreme Court Case Selection, 82 Wash. U. L.Q. 389, 397-406 (2004); Kathryn A. Watts, Constraining Certiorari Using Administrative Law Principles, 160 U. Penn. L. Rev. 1, 14-18 (2011).
For instance, when a respondent declines to file a brief in opposition to certiorari (a frequent occurrence), the Court may issue an order calling for a response. That order suggests that the petition caught the eye of at least one Justice. The Court occasionally takes the further step of calling for the views of the Solicitor General. That move—typically made when a petition raises an issue of potential interest to the federal government but the government is not itself a party to the proceedings—requires the assent of four Justices and signals that a petition is a serious candidate for plenary review. See David C. Thompson & Melanie F. Wachtell, An Empirical Analysis of Supreme Court Certiorari Petition Procedures: The Call for Response and the Call for the Views of the Solicitor General, 16 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 237 (2009). Court-watchers also study whether petitions are disposed of according to the expected timetable. See, e.g., John Elwood, Relist Watch, SCOTUSBlog (Jan. 23, 2014, 12:37 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/01/relist-watch-31. If a petition is held over, then a Justice may have requested more time to consider a petition or to seek to persuade his or her colleagues to grant it.
A similar observation can be made when a Justice decides to write a separate concurrence or an individual dissent in a case that the Court has decided on the merits. See Andrew Pincus, Remarks at the Institutional Supreme Court Panel at the Yale Law Journal Symposium on Justice Sotomayor’s Early Jurisprudence (Feb. 3, 2014).
She issued an additional statement early in the Court’s current Term. See Woodward v. Alabama, 134 S. Ct. 405 (2013) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari); see infra notes 22-28 and accompanying text.
See Christopher E. Smith, The Changing Supreme Court and Prisoners’ Rights, 44 Ind. L. Rev. 853, 880 (2011) (making the Stevens-Sotomayor comparison). Interestingly, early in his tenure on the Court, Justice Stevens was skeptical of the practice of issuing statements respecting the denial of certiorari. See Singleton v. Comm’r, 439 U.S. 940, 944-46 (1978) (statement of Stevens, J., respecting the denial of certiorari).
See 2008 Term Opinions Relating to Orders, Sup. Ct. of the U.S., http://www.supremecourt .gov/opinions/relatingtoorders.aspx?Term=08 (last visited Feb. 14, 2014).
See 2009 Term Opinions Relating to Orders, Sup. Ct. of the U.S., http://www.supremecourt .gov/opinions/relatingtoorders.aspx?Term=09 (last visited Feb. 14, 2014).
See 2010 Term Opinions Relating to Orders, Sup. Ct. of the U.S., http://www.supremecourt .gov/opinions/relatingtoorders.aspx?Term=10 (last visited Feb. 14, 2014); 2011 Term Opinions Relating to Orders, Sup. Ct. of the U.S., http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions /relatingtoorders.aspx?Term=11 (last visited Feb. 14, 2014); 2012 Term Opinions Relating to Orders, Sup. Ct. of the U.S., http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/relatingtoorders.aspx ?Term=12 (last visited Feb. 14, 2014).
The only case from the paid docket was Cash v. Maxwell, 132 S. Ct. 611 (2011), in which Justice Sotomayor filed a statement responding to Justice Alito’s dissent from the denial of certiorari.
See Woodward v. Alabama, 134 S. Ct. 405 (2013) (whether a judge may sentence a defendant to death where the jury has recommended a life sentence); Calhoun v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1136 (2013) (whether the defendant should have received a new trial in light of a prosecutor’s racially charged remarks); Gamache v. California, 131 S. Ct. 591 (2010) (whether the California Supreme Court mistakenly placed on the defendant the burden of proving that an error was not harmless);Wrotten v. New York, 130 S. Ct. 2520 (2010) (whether the use of two-way video testimony violates the Confrontation Clause).
See Haynes v. Thaler, 133 S. Ct. 639 (2012) (whether a habeas petitioner was entitled to press his ineffective assistance of counsel claim); Hodge v. Kentucky, 133 S. Ct. 506 (2012) (whether a state court applied the wrong standard in deciding whether a habeas petitioner was prejudiced by his counsel’s deficient performance); Fairey v. Tucker, 132 S. Ct. 2218 (2012) (whether a habeas petitioner who was convicted on felony charges in absentia and without counsel was entitled to relief); Cash v. Maxwell, 132 S. Ct. 611 (2012) (whether relief was properly granted to a habeas petitioner who had been convicted based on the testimony of an unreliable informant); Buck v. Thaler, 132 S. Ct. 32 (2011) (whether the decision to sentence a habeas petitioner to death was tainted by racially charged testimony); Williams v. Hobbs, 131 S. Ct. 558 (2010) (whether a state may withhold an objection to an evidentiary hearing until after the hearing is held and habeas relief is granted).
See Pitre v. Cain, 131 S. Ct. 8 (2010) (whether a prisoner who had allegedly been required to do hard labor after refusing to take his HIV medication had stated an Eighth Amendment claim).
See Miriam H. Baer, Secrecy, Intimacy, and Workable Rules: Justice Sotomayor Stakes Out the Middle Ground in United States v. Jones, 123 Yale L.J. F. 393 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/secrecy-intimacy-and-workable-rules; Rachel E. Barkow, Justice Sotomayor and Criminal Justice in the Real World, 123 Yale L.J. F. 409 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/justice-sotomayor-and-criminal-justice-in-the-real-world; I. Bennett Capers, Reading Michigan v. Bryant, “Reading” Justice Sotomayor, 123 Yale L.J. F. 427 (2014), http://yalelawjournal.org/forum/reading-michigan-v-bryant-reading-justice -sotomayor.
See, e.g., Unger v. Young, 134 S. Ct. 20 (2013) (Alito, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari) (arguing that the Court should have reversed the Second Circuit’s grant of habeas relief); Cash v. Maxwell, 132 S. Ct 611, 613 (2012) (Scalia, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari) (arguing that the Court should have reversed the Ninth Circuit’s grant of habeas relief).
See, e.g., Johnson v. Bredesen, 130 S. Ct. 541 (2009) (statement of Stevens, J., respecting the denial of certiorari) (asserting that lengthy stays on death row constitute cruel and unusual punishment); Kelly v. California, 129 S. Ct. 564 (2008) (statement of Stevens, J., respecting the denial of certiorari) (expressing concern about the use of certain victim impact evidence during capital sentencing proceedings); Walker v. Georgia, 129 S. Ct. 453 (2008) (statement of Stevens, J., respecting the denial of certiorari) (questioning the seeming disproportionality of a defendant’s capital sentence).
Id. at 408. Some Alabama judges had, in fact, acknowledged that electoral considerations affected their sentencing practices. Id. at 409.
Id. at 411-12. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent from the denial of certiorari in Hodge v. Kentucky, 133 S. Ct. 506 (2012), and statement respecting the denial of certiorari in Gamache v. California, 131 S. Ct. 591 (2010), likewise focus on the functioning of state judicial systems. The petitioner in Hodge sought review of a decision from the Kentucky Supreme Court rejecting his claim that his trial counsel provided ineffective assistance during his capital sentencing proceeding by failing to present mitigating evidence. Justice Sotomayor expressed concern that the Kentucky Supreme Court’s understanding of mitigation evidence was “plainly contrary” to U.S. Supreme Court precedent and improperly discounted the potential of such evidence to affect sentencing outcomes. Hodge, 133 S. Ct. at 510 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari). The petitioner in Gamache sought review of the California Supreme Court’s conclusion that a constitutional error at his trial was harmless. Justice Sotomayor took exception to the California Supreme Court’s articulation of the harmless-error standard. Contrary to U.S. Supreme Court precedent, the California Supreme Court appeared to place the burden on the defendant to show harm instead of placing the burden on the government to prove harmlessness. Gamache, 131 S. Ct. at 592 (statement of Sotomayor, J., respecting the denial of certiorari). Because this apparent error was not outcome determinative in the petitioner’s case, Justice Sotomayor did not dissent from the Court’s decision to deny review. But she cautioned the California courts to take care in future cases “to ensure that their burden allocation conforms to the commands of Chapman [v. California, 386 U.S. 18 (1967)].” Id. at 593.
While cross-examining the petitioner about his professed ignorance of a drug transaction, the prosecutor asked, “You’ve got African-Americans, you’ve got Hispanics, you’ve got a bag full of money. Does that tell you—a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say, This is a drug deal.” Id. at 1136. The prosecutor later revisited this line of questioning during closing argument. See id. at 1137 n.*.
Id. Justice Sotomayor also addressed a criminal prosecution “marred by racial overtones” in her dissent from the denial of certiorari in Buck v. Thaler, 132 S. Ct. 32, 35 (2011) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari). The petitioner in Buck had been sentenced to death following a penalty-phase hearing at which a state prosecutor, while cross-examining a psychologist called by the petitioner, elicited testimony linking race and future dangerousness. Id. at 35-36 (“‘You have determined . . . that the race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons; is that correct?’”). The same psychologist had offered testimony in several other capital cases, and the State of Texas confessed error in those cases. Id. at 36. But it refused to do so in Buck, and according to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent,gave the federal habeas court an incomplete and “misleading” explanation for its about-face. Id. at 37. The possibility of a death sentence tainted by racially charged testimony, combined with a lack of candor by government attorneys after the fact, led Justice Sotomayor to conclude that the case warranted review.
Id. at 10. Justice Sotomayor’s dissents from the denial of certiorari in Williams v. Hobbs, 131 S. Ct. 558 (2010) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari), and Fairey v. Tucker, 132 S. Ct. 2218 (2012) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari), likewise took issue with judicial acquiescence to questionable government conduct. The petitioner in Hobbs, a death row prisoner, sought federal habeas relief on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel. After conducting an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the petitioner had been prejudiced by his trial counsel’s poor performance at sentencing, the district court granted relief. Despite consenting to the evidentiary hearing in the district court and attempting to use the hearing to its strategic advantage, the government turned around on appeal and argued that the hearing never should have been held. The court of appeals accepted the government’s arguments and reinstated the petitioner’s death sentence. Criticizing the court of appeals, Justice Sotomayor wrote that, “the interests of justice are poorly served by a rule that allows a State to object to an evidentiary hearing only after the hearing has been completed and the State has lost.” Hobbs, 131 S. Ct. at 561. In Fairey, the petitioner was tried on state felony charges in absentia and without counsel after the state failed to give him actual notice of his trial date. After the state courts rejected his appeals, he sought federal habeas relief, which the district court denied. The district court and court of appeals refused even to issue a “certificate of appealability” to allow petitioner to file an appeal. Fairey, 132 S. Ct. at 2218; see also 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c)(2) (2014) (“A certificate of appealability may issue . . . only if the applicant has made a substantial showing of the denial of a constitutional right.”). Justice Sotomayor found both aspects of petitioner’s treatment—the in-absentia trial and the denial of the certificate—unacceptable. In her words, “[a] trial conducted without actual notice to a defendant and in his absence makes a mockery of fair process and the constitutional right to be present at trial.” Fairey, 132 S. Ct. at 2221. She “would [have] grant[ed] the petition [for certiorari] and summarily reverse[d] the judgment below” denying the certificate. Id.
Sup. Ct. R. 10(a) & (b); see, e.g., Amanda Frost, Overvaluing Uniformity, 94 Va. L. Rev. 1567, 1569 (2008) (“[S]eventy percent of Court’s plenary docket is devoted to addressing legal issues on which lower courts have differed, and law clerks and Justices alike have acknowledged that ensuring uniformity is a driving force in case selection.”); David R. Stras, The Supreme Court’s Gatekeepers: The Role of Law Clerks in the Certiorari Process, 85 Tex. L. Rev. 947, 981-82 (2007) (same).
During the 2012 Term, for instance, the Court granted certiorari and summarily reversed without argument in five cases. Three of these decisions wiped out rulings in favor of prisoners seeking habeas corpus. See Ryan v. Schad, 133 S. Ct. 2548 (2013); Nevada v. Jackson, 133 S. Ct. 1990 (2013); Marshall v. Rodgers, 133 S. Ct. 1446 (2013). None of them granted relief to a criminal defendant or prisoner. Likewise, six of the Court’s eleven summary reversals during the 2011 Term nullified rulings in favor of habeas petitioners and a seventh went against a family that sought damages for alleged police misconduct. See Parker v. Matthews, 132 S. Ct. 2148 (2012); Coleman v. Johnson, 132 S. Ct. 2060 (2012); Wetzel v. Lambert, 132 S. Ct. 1195 (2012); Ryburn v. Huff, 132 S. Ct. 987 (2012); Hardy v. Cross, 132 S. Ct. 490 (2011); Bobby v. Dixon, 132 S. Ct. 26 (2011); Cavazos v. Smith, 132 S. Ct. 2 (2011). Again, none granted relief to a criminal defendant or prisoner. See also Merits Opinions,SCOTUSBlog (June 27, 2013), http://scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013 /06/merits-opinions_OT12.pdf (charting summary reversals by Term).
Stephen G. Breyer, Reflections on the Role of Appellate Courts: A View from the Supreme Court, 8 J. App. Prac. & Process 91, 92 (2006) (citation omitted); see also Gressman et al., supra note 13, at 276 (“It has been reiterated many times that the Supreme Court is not primarily concerned with the correction of errors in lower court decisions.” (citation omitted)). But cf. Frost, supra note 46, at 1569-71 (contending that the Supreme Court places too much emphasis on attempting to ensure uniformity in federal law); Tracey E. George & Chris Guthrie, Remaking the United States Supreme Court in the Courts’ of Appeals Image, 58 Duke L.J. 1439, 1447 (2009) (advocating institutional reforms that would increase the Supreme Court’s capacity “to correct more errors committed by lower courts”).
See, e.g., Coleman v. Johnson, 132 S. Ct. 2060, (2012) (reversing a federal appellate court’s grant of habeas relief and criticizing the court for “fail[ing] to afford due respect to the role of the jury and the state courts”).
Justice Sotomayor herself has written about improving “public confidence” in the legal profession by “weeding out fraudulent and wrongful conduct.” See Sonia Sotomayor & Nicole A. Gordon, Returning Majesty to the Law and Politics: A Modern Approach, 30 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 35, 46 (1996).
Cf. Ryan J. Owens & David A. Simon, Explaining the Supreme Court’s Shrinking Docket, 58 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1219, 1260 (2012) (“When the Court fails to hear a case, it may change how Americans view the judiciary. In other words, what cases the Court decides to hear—and not hear—is important in terms of perception and, ultimately, legitimacy.”);William J. Brennan, Jr., The National Court of Appeals: Another Dissent, 40 U. Chi. L. Rev. 473, 483 (1973) (“The choice of issues for decision largely determines the image that the American people have of their Supreme Court.”).
See, e.g., Timothy R. Johnson et al., Hear Me Roar: What Provokes Supreme Court Justices to Dissent from the Bench?, 93 Minn. L. Rev. 1560, 1568 (2009) (observing that dissents from the denial of certiorari “provide an avenue through which a Justice may communicate with external actors” and “relay information to litigants regarding strategies for getting similar cases accepted in the future”).

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