Who Wins in the Supreme Court? An Examination of Attorney and Law Firm Influence

Abstract

Who are the most successful attorneys in the Supreme Court? A novel way to answer this question is by looking at attorneys' relative influence on the course of the law. This article performs macro and micro-level analyses of the most successful Supreme Court litigators by examining the amount of language shared between nearly 9,500 Supreme Court merits briefs and their respective Supreme Court opinions from 1946 through 2013. The article also includes analyses of the most successful law firms according to the same metric.

Keywords: merits briefs, law firms, attorneys, opinion language, attorney experience, Supreme Court, empirical legal studies, judicial behavior