The U.S. Supreme Court gets thousands of appeals every year but it is accepting fewer of them. Looking at the average number of cases handled over the 234 years the court has been in session, it has decided an average of 132 cases per year. After the Judiciary Act of 1925 gave the court sole discretion over which cases would be heard, the court accepted an average of of 149 cases annually.
In 2024, the court heard 62 cases. Over the decade from 2015 to 2024, it heard an average of 68 cases. In the previous decade, it accepted an average of 81 cases and from 1994 to 2024 the average was 91 cases.
It’s not that the cases are more important: In 1967, when the court decided Miranda v. Arizona, the source of the Miranda statement of rights, the Supreme Court heard 370 cases. The following year, when the court decided in Terry v. Ohio that police officers can search a person they have a “reasonable suspicion” is carrying a weapon or contraband, 361 cases were decided. District of Columbia v. Heller was one of 116 cases accepted in 2008. But in 2022, the year of the Bruen decision, the court heard just 47 cases.
The Supreme Court’s budget for FY 2025 is $143 million, just for salaries and expenses. This means taxpayers are paying $2.36 million per case. That figure would have been $1.8 million had the court heard the average number of cases it did in the decade from 2005 to 2014. Needless to say, we’re getting a lot less bang for our bucks.
We’ve had multiple disappointments in the court’s current term. The opinion in VanDerStok v. Garland, the denial of certiorari in Antonyuk v. James, and what appears to be endless punting in Snope v. Brown are sore points. At best, we may get the court to hear Snope in the 2025-2026 term.
The Judiciary Act of 1925 means there’s no second-guessing the cases the Supreme Court chooses to hear. However, Congress’ power of the purse still controls how much of the federal budget will be allocated to the court. It’s well within Congress’ authority to condition how much money the Supreme Court will get based on the volume of cases accepted.
Next year, the associate justices on the Supreme Court will be paid $303,600 per year; the chief justice will get $317,500. So we will be paying $2,736,400 for the bench or $44,295 per case at the 2024 volume. We could same more than $10,000 per case if the court heard 81 cases, the average from 2005 to 2014.
Neither President Trump nor Congress can dictate which cases the Supreme Court selects. But they can dictate how much they’re paid to hear each one.
