SCOTUS Mapper Library: Civ Pro

This map shows the Court's doctrine regarding the "collateral order" exception to the "final judgment" rule. Click on image to open full-sized map with links to underlying opinions. For further explanation, see this blog post.

Click here to see full-sized version of this map with links to underlying opinions.

On November 10, 2014, the Supreme Court handed down a per curiam opinion in Johnson v. City of Shelby. This represents the latest entry into the Court's sometimes contentious pleadings doctrine. The map above represents an updated version of the map discussed in the pleadings video below (created with Prof. Scott Dodson). Please see the blog entry here for discussion of this latest map.

To download annotated text of this video (complete with footnotes), click here.

Please click here for a full-sized version of the map with links to the underlying opinions.

In 2014, the Supreme Court decided Tolan v. Cotton, the latest in a relatively small series of cases interpreting FRCP 56 -- the federal rule relating to summary judgment. The map above shows the citation network connecting Tolan to one of the Court's key summary judgment cases -- Adickes v. Kress (1970). This network was created by linking Tolan to Adickes at 3 degrees and filled out by linking Tolan to important intermediate cases (Creighton and Scott) at 3 degrees. The entire network was filtered to display only those cases containing the text "summary judgment."

This map is displayed on the Spaeth axis (Spaeth-coded liberal decisions are teal; Spaeth-coded conservative decisions are orange). The map shows that cases in the network have an average degree of dissent of 0.53 -- making the "average decision" a 7-2. However, if we don't include the relatively controversial "1986 summary judgment trilogy", the average degree of dissent drops to 0.38 (much closer to 8-1). In other words, there has been a higher degree of consensus in this doctrine since the big 1986 cases. This is as one would hope -- a procedural form such as summary judgment is far less likely to involve hot-button value judgments such as those seen in Eighth Amendment or Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.