The Supreme Court’s 2025-26 Term: Some Initial Impressions

With the filing of the term’s last substantive decision, it’s time for the first installment in our annual survey of the justices’ work.  Recent years have generated some unusual developments, and it will be interesting to see if they persisted in 2025-26.

Number of decisions filed
Along with the dawning of liberal dominance (a topic for another post in this series), the most striking feature of the last two terms has been the plunging number of decisions.  After averaging roughly 50 decisions per term for several years, the total sank all the way to 14 in 2023-24.  A recovery to 22 decisions in 2024-25 encouraged speculation that the previous term’s yield of 14 decisions might come to seem an aberration if the total continued to climb from 22 to within sight of, say, 40 decisions.  This would remain far below figures for the early 21^st century, let alone the 20^th (Graphs 1 and 2), but it would be a noteworthy advance.  Instead, the output for 2025-26 fell again, back to 19 decisions, bolstering conjecture that the court’s new normal may be settling in a range whose upper end will struggle to reach even 30.^[1]

Days to decision
The most dramatic departure from the previous term concerns the average number of days between oral argument and filing of a decision.  From 137 days in 2024-25, the average soared by a full month to 167 days in 2025-26 (Graph 3), even though the justices filed fewer decisions.  Not only does 167 days top the average for the preceding term, it also surpasses the average for every other term in the 110-year period covered to date by SCOWstats—and doubtless for the entire history of the court.

The unusual nature of the past three terms regarding these two statistics—the average number of days to filing and the total number of decisions filed—emerges distinctly when we create a ratio of the two figures.  That is, for each term, we divide the average number of days to decision by the total number of decisions filed.  In 2004-05, for instance, the average number of days to decision was 125 and the total number of decisions was 96, producing a ratio of 1.3 (125 days/96 decisions).  For 2025-26 we get 8.8 (167 days/19 decisions).  Thus, the larger the average number of days to decision, and the smaller the total number of decisions filed, the larger the ratio.

Over the first two decades covered in the following chart (1985-86 to 2005-06), the ratio scarcely exceeded 1 for numerous terms and rose as high as 1.7 just once.  Thereafter, all the way from 2006-07 to 2022-23, the ratio averaged only 2.5 and never topped 3.3.  But then, during the last three terms, it surged to levels several times higher than those of the chart’s initial decades and 2-4 times the ratios for more recent years.  In a nutshell, the last three years have witnessed something unprecedented at the court: tiny numbers of decisions that required a very long time to file.

Length of decisions
In 2023-24 the court’s decisions averaged an extraordinary 75 pages.  As no previous term had approached this figure, the 2024-25 term commenced with the question of whether bulging decisions would persist.  They did not, for the average fell back to 45 pages (when converted to formatting in use prior to 2024-25).^[2]  The average rose again in 2025-26, but only to 50 pages—well within the normal range of the past 15-20 years (Graph 4).

It’s also worth noting that decisions in 2025-26 averaged the same number of pages for majority opinions and separate opinions (concurrences and dissents).^[3]  Fifteen years ago majority opinions consumed a much larger portion of decisions than did separate opinions, but that has changed of late, as shown in Table 1.  No longer is it unusual for separate opinions to account for almost 50% of a decision’s pages—indeed, an average of exactly 50% in 2025-26.

Average number of separate opinions per decision
Separate opinions could compose 50% of the average decision’s pages if these concurrences and dissents were rare but extremely long.  However, this has not been the case in recent years, as nearly every decision included separate opinions, and frequently more than one.  True to form, they populated 16 of 19 decisions in 2025-26 (and 49 of 54 decisions over the past three terms), a considerably higher rate than previously normal for the three decades covered in Table 2.

[1] The figures in the following graphs do not include 3-3 per curiam decisions and cases dismissed as improvidently granted.

[2] The court adopted a new formatting style for its decisions in 2024-25 that generates pages containing slightly over 50 percent more words than did pages formatted in the old style.  Consequently, in order to compare the length of decisions from 2024-25 and thereafter with those of previous terms, I have estimated the average number of words per page in decisions from 2024-25 and from earlier terms in order to convert new-style page totals for 2024-25 and beyond to the number of old-style pages required to contain the same number of words.

[3] To be clear, the figures for separate opinions are not the average length of a single concurrence or dissent.  They are the average number of pages per decision of concurrences and dissents combined.  The averages for both majority opinions and separate opinions are rounded to the nearest page.  The averages for majority opinions prior to 2024-25 do not include the page or two at the beginning of decisions that list the parties and the attorneys—information that is not provided in the newly-formatted decisions introduced in 2024-25.