I was standing up to grab my bags on an Amtrak train when I saw a woman across the aisle crying, looking at her phone. She looked up at me and said: “Roe was just overturned.” An increasingly familiar feeling of shock and not-shock hit me—a draft of the opinion had leaked the month before. Still, I couldn’t help but think, “How?”
I now know part of the answer: the more than 80 amicus briefs submitted in support of the petitioner, namely Thomas E. Dobbs, then Mississippi’s state health officer, who sought to end abortions in the state.
I learned this because I wrote code to scrape every single document from the Dobbs docket on the Supreme Court website, as well as the dockets of dozens of other cases, for an investigation with my colleague Pema Levy. The result is a data-intensive dive into the conservative funding networks behind "friend of the court," or amicus, briefs at the highest court. From our latest:
The number of these briefs has risen dramatically in recent years and now routinely tops 800 per term—an eightfold increase since the 1950s and about double the number from 1995. This uptick has also coincided with the court reducing its docket by about 35 percent since 1995. While the briefs, which present arguments from interested parties other than the litigants, are inherently something of a sideshow, academic researchers have found that the justices have been citing them more frequently and, according to plagiarism detection software, sometimes lift significant sentences, phrases, and ideas from amicus briefs without citation.
Intrigued? For more on the right-wing networks pushing the Supreme Court to give billionaires what they want, head to our piece.
—Melissa Lewis
