With the end of the U. S. Supreme Court's term, there is lots of discussion in the press and the blogosphere of the 5-4 decisions, Justice Kennedy's remarkable position as the deciding vote in all 24 of them, and of the more conservative direction of the court, usually exaggerating the latter point.

A perennial end-of-term topic that hasn't received much attention this year is the rate of reversal of the various federal circuits. As I have noted in previous years, simple reversal rate doesn't mean much. The Supreme Court reverses most of the decisions it accepts for full review, 72% this term according to SCOTUSblog. Reversal by a 5-4 Supreme Court generally indicates the issue was close, and there was plenty of room for disagreement. More telling is the number of decisions reversed by a Supreme Court that is unanimous or nearly so. Given the ideological spread on the Court, a large number of reversals with no votes or only one vote to affirm indicates a problem.

I tallied the regional, numbered federal circuits, relying on SCOTUSblog's statpack for the votes. (The Federal and D.C. Circuits have a different mix of cases and aren't comparable. Certiorari to state courts is granted too sporadically to get much of a sample.)

By my count, there were 23 cases where the lower court judgment was reversed or vacated without dissent or with only one dissenting vote. Of these, 11, or nearly half, came from the Notorious Ninth. The Ninth is large, to be sure, but it comprises less than one-fifth of the national population. Its proportion of these cases is out of whack even considering its size. If we look only at 9-0 reversals, it's even worse: 9 of 17.

As noted here, there is some indication that the Ninth is beginning to clean up its act and granting rehearing en banc more often to rein in its rogue panel decisions. It has got a long way to go, though.