The New Certiorari Game

TWENTY YEARS AGO political scientist Glendon Schubert introduced the Certiorari Game." Schubert examined the Federal Employees' Liability evidentiary cases from the 1942 to 1948 terms of the Supreme Court. He found that a bloc of four justices (Black, Douglas, Murphy, Rutledge), by voting for certiorari when the Court of Appeals had reversed a District Court decision favoring the railroad workers, were successful 92% of the time in securing a decision of the Court in support of the workers. A limitation of Schubert's research is that it is not based upon the actual certiorari voting. Rather, Schubert inferred how the justices voted on cert mainly by looking at how they voted on the final vote on the merits.2 It would be better, of course, to investigate the success of the justices voting to grant certiorari by inspecting the cert vote as well. The cert voting has already been used to show significant relationships between the vote on certiorari and the final on the