- This exercise of deferential jurisprudence—federal courts seeking legal opinions from state or local courts of last resort—is known as certification of unsettled legal questions, and scholars debate whether it is an effective and worthwhile process for adjudicating thorny controversies.
- Every state but North Carolina has a high court certification procedure
- During an Aug. 12 Federalist Society webinar, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton of the Western District of Kentucky said he remains “skeptical” over whether certification of state-law questions by federal courts has any efficiency benefits. Beaton said it could take months or years for the certification process to play out, arguing this does not save time, energy or resources. Beaton encouraged federal courts to make their best “Erie guess” of predicting how a state court may rule on novel questions of state law, because certifying questions to a state high court “feels like kind of a dodge”
Bloomberg Law has Supreme Court Workload Backloaded as Justices Hear Fewer Cases
- The justices last term penned more concurring opinions, 62, than majority ones, 59, accounting for almost 40% of total decisions issued in argued cases
- And those separate opinions have gotten longer. The average length of a concurring opinion has ballooned from 815 words in the court’s 2016 term to 2,155 words last term
- Like concurrences, majority and dissenting opinions have also become longer -- Majority opinions have grown by nearly 800 words since 2016 to just over 5,000 words and dissents have more than doubled in that same period to around 5,900 words.
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