I'm so sick of hearing about "activist" judges. While there are plenty of things to complain about the Right keeps making up these claims about an out of control judiciary. Threats of violence by senators seemed common just last week. Do they really believe their bullshit? They often cite the 9th circuit in California.
That's nice isn't it. "Out of control hippies!!", "The most overturned court in the country!!"
They may have the most overturned, but they also have the most upheld. This is missed by most.
The rate of reversals is actually the same as the other courts. There are just more cases accepted in part because the 9th gets more cases. This
article from law.com describes the "non-controversy" pretty well.
The numbers just don't jibe with the controversy.
For the third year in a row, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- for many, the black-robed embodiment of crazy West Coast liberalism -- fared about the same as other circuits when it came to getting reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But as the circuit moves toward shaking its reputation for being out of step with courts in the rest of the country, a new trend appears on the rise.
"The most striking fact is not the reversal rate, but the number of cases accepted," said Arthur Hellman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
Ninth Circuit appeals accounted for about one-third of the Supreme Court's docket in the term that ended Tuesday -- 25 of 78 cases. Hellman said about one-sixth of petitions for certiorari were from the 9th Circuit, meaning that the Supreme Court is "taking cases from the 9th Circuit at a much higher rate than you would expect."
Although the reversal rate was normal, the term was not without trouble. More than half of the 9th Circuit's 19 reversals were unanimous. Those include Tuesday's final case from the circuit, Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 04 C.D.O.S. 5790, which deals with the Federal Tort Claims Act and the Alien Tort statute. The 9th Circuit had allowed a man abducted from Mexico to sue the United States for false arrest.
Legal scholars offer a handful of explanations for the circuit's increasing domination of the high court docket, which they noticed a few years ago. One reason may be that the West is a cultural and economic powerhouse, a place where novel legal issues are simply more likely to come up.
"If an issue is not happening somewhere on the West Coast, it's probably not a significant issue," said Hastings College of the Law professor Vikram Amar.Text to go inside the quote box
It's only obvious from the volume of cases handled by the 9th that the Supreme Court will get more cases from them than by other courts. The number of cases that don't go to the Supreme Court outnumber those of other courts too. Making the 9th the most upheld in the country.
When faced with the facts, like the actual rate of reversal, most right-wingers don't know what to say.