A while back we did a post speculating that requesting argument on a motion moderately increased the chances of the Court actually holding argument on an issue.
We also speculated about several other effects of requesting argument, but I'll save those for another slow news day. I apologize for nothing.
Stone Cold Facts
To test out this theory, I picked a motion that I pegged at about a 50/50 chance of having an argument -- a motion to stay. Taking all of the decisions deciding such motions since the first of the year (and removing some in odd procedural circumstances as well as filtering out identical motions in related cases to clean up the data), we get a total of:
Likelihood of Argument on Motion to Stay
Motions Decided: 29
Number Where the Court Held Argument: 17
% of cases where the Court held argument: 58%
So my hunch on the likelihood of argument was pretty good. Well played me. Next lets see how often the parties request argument:
Likelihood of a Party Requesting argument
# of motions where either party requested argument: 8 (27%)
# of Motions where the parties played it cool: 21 (83%)
This one surprised me. I'd expected to see significantly greater amount of requests. But I suppose that's why you go through the data. Now, to get to the part you really want to see:
Effect of Request on Likelihood of Argument
Likelihood of Court holding argument if either party requests it: 75% (!)
Likelihood of Court holding argument if neither party requests it: 42%
Rank Speculation
This effect is quite a bit bigger than I'd expected. Of course all of the usual caveats regarding my woefully small sample size apply. In addition, there may be some reason that the effect is larger in motions to stay than in other contexts, although I can't fathom why that might be. Look for more in this series next week.
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