Every metric agrees.
Caplan ‘21 [Lincoln; May 4; Received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, senior research scholar and Truman Capote Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, contributing editor of The American Scholar and of Harvard Magazine; Vanderbilt Law Review, “The SG’s Indefensible Advantage: A Comment on The Loudest Voice at the Supreme Court,” https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wordpress-0/wp-content/uploads/sites/278/2021/05/19115806/The-SGs-Indefensible-Advantage-A-Comment-on-The-Loudest-Voice-at-the-Supreme-Court.pdf] dedeepya
What is visible understates the closeness and the specialness of the connections between the Court and the SG’s office, which become clearer the more you learn about the behind-the scenes dealings between them. As Vladeck wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 2019, “the Court’s rules and traditions both formally and informally privilege the Solicitor General as the de facto head of the Court’s bar—and show special solicitude to the Solicitor General across a constellation of considerations.”46 With the SG and the SG’s office often functioning as counselors to the Court, the Court favors them.
Still, those visible markings make clear how much the Court favors the SG and the SG’s office. By every measure that matters—the percentage of petitions for writs of certiorari from the SG that the Court has accepted; the percentage of cases the SG has won as a party; the percentage of cases the SG has won as an amicus curiae, or friend of the Court; the percentage of the SG’s requests to make oral arguments as an amicus that the Court has granted; the increase in success of parties other than the government when the SG is an amicus on behalf of those parties—the record of the SG’s office, going back generations, is much better than any other advocate’s.47
In 2013, the political scientists Ryan C. Black and Ryan J. Owens published an article assessing why the SG’s office “wins the vast majority of Supreme Court cases in which it participates.”48 They concluded what the record shows: lawyers in the office “wield significant influence over the Court and enjoy a built-in advantage” based on “the office’s longstanding relationship with the Court” as well as the skill, expertise, and experience of its lawyers—a quality the authors term “professionalism.”49 Black and Owens questioned whether this advantage is warranted: “the findings suggest researchers should examine more fully the Office of the Solicitor General.”50