Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

This Article offers the first systematic analysis of the administrative impact and practical consequences of the U.S. Supreme Court's filing requirements. The lack of meaningful research on this subject reveals how Justices, clerks, and lawyers have become inured to these requirements and their attendant costs.

Every year, the Supreme Court receives approximately five thousand petitions for certiorari. With some exceptions, the Court compels litigants to file multiple paper copies of their submissions. When combined, these submissions exceed two hundred thousand documents, which include over five million separate pieces of paper. If stacked, these documents would reach beyond the height of the tallest building in the United States. If weighed, these filings would require over thirty-three tons of paper to produce. Significantly, these documents are filed with the Court every year before it has even granted the petition for certiorari, which occurs in less than two percent of cases.

Because litigants must submit electronic copies of their filings through the Court’s online filing system, requiring them to also submit paper copies is unnecessary and wasteful. For these reasons, the Court should revise its submission rules to eliminate the requirement of paper submissions, particularly at the certiorari stage.

Litigation costs are already significant at the Supreme Court. The Court’s filing requirements reinforce the inaccessibility of justice to economically marginalized litigants by forcing them to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on processing, printing, filing, and serving unneeded documents. Environmental harm should not be added to the costs of seeking judicial review. By quantifying the effects of the Court’s filing requirements, their administrative impact and practical consequences can be measured, highlighted, and hopefully changed.

Download

Included in

Law Commons

Share

COinS