Is the wine retailer shipping case red hot in Supreme Court circles!

Now that the Supreme Court passed Lebamoff v. Whitmer, which pertains to a challenge to Michigan’s discriminatory wine shipping law, down the road to another conference, what are the ramifications?

Is this an intentional act or is the Supreme Court’s schedule so busy, that it had no choice but to delay conference on the case.

Although we can never say for certain why the Supreme Court reschedules a case to a conference date down the line, I wanted to seek out data to see if there is a plausible hypothesis to explain the Court’s rescheduling.

While looking through the data, I found something that may explain why the Court rescheduled the conference for Lebamoff. 

I looked at all the similarly situated cases to Lebamoff, those originally set for conference on December 11, 2020, and those where the Court requested a response from the other side. In these cases, a cert petition is filed and the other side waives the right to respond. The Court then reserves the right to require the other side to respond to the cert petition from the petitioner. Requesting a response from the other, shows the Court maintains a heightened interest in the case.

If the Court rescheduled numerous cases in this category, I figured that the delay was due to heavy case loads or logistics. If there were very few cases rescheduled, I think it shows that the Court is pretty enthusiastic about the cases that are rescheduled.

There were 18 cases scheduled for December 11th in which there was a response on file. (The cases that were relisted were not included in this count).

Of the 18 cases in this category, only one was rescheduled for a later date, that case, Lebamoff v. Whitmer. 

What can I infer, this case has someone interested in it. I also believe this case is getting more scrutiny than the average case. The next conference is not scheduled until January 8th, which would be the earliest it could be set for Conference.

This means there is ample time to look into this case.

In the end, we don’t know what the Court is going to do. But I think their action shows that this case is a hot one in the Court circles.