?:reviewBody
|
-
Following a 9 February 2017 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding an injunction that halted a temporary U.S. entry restriction enacted via an Executive Order on 27 January 2017, social media users began sharing posts holding that approximately 80 percent of the decisions handed down by that court were eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS). Many of those users cited a 9 February 2017 blog post which asserted that: The blog linked to a 2010 American Bar Association paper which opened by pointing out two common erroneous beliefs about Supreme Court reversals in general: So, although correctly worded, the blog post left many readers with the mistaken impression that 80 percent of the Ninth Circuit Court's decisions were being overturned by SCOTUS. What it actually said was that of the very tiny fraction of decisions by federal courts of appeal that SCOTUS agrees to review each year (0.1%), 80 percent of that small portion of appeals originating with the Ninth Circuit Court were overturned. With respect to how the Ninth Court came to be described as a rogue court, the paper referenced above maintained: The paper contained three tables tallying specific circuit court figures for the period between 1998 and 2008: With respect to the figures provided in the tables, the paper held that they did not seem to support the notion that SCOTUS only takes cases that it intends to reverse or vacate: In short, social media claims that 80 percent of cases decided by the Ninth Circuit were overturned were flat out false; more than 99 percent of that circuit's decisions stood and the Supreme Court reviewed a scant 0.106 percent of circuit court cases each year. Although figures from 2010 maintained the Ninth Circuit [had] the second highest reversal rate at 80 [percent], the highest was the Federal Circuit court's median of 83 percent. However, left out of both the rumors and the blog post was the fact that the average rate of accepted cases ruled upon differently by the Supreme Court than a lower circuit court was over 68 percent across all courts. So of less than one percent of all cases reviewed by the Supreme Court, 68 percent of decisions across all circuits were overturned. Eighty percent of decisions by the Ninth Circuit were overturned when escalated to the Supreme Court, but the numbers were misleading taken out of context.
(en)
|