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Forcing Supreme Court Review By The Federal Circuit, Jeremy W. Bock

Buffalo Law Review

From time to time, a federal court of appeals may want the Supreme Court to take a case because it is stuck: there is an unresolved issue that is important to the day-to-day administration of justice, but an en banc sitting would be futile. The Supreme Court, however, has a haystack problem: it receives several thousand certiorari petitions each year, of which approximately 1% receive plenary review. The literature suggests that the selection of the certworthy needles in this petition haystack is a black-box process affected by discretion and situational factors that make timely review unpredictable and difficult to obtain. …