The Supreme Court summarily reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Andrew v. White. Such summary reversals used to be somewhat commonplace. (Indeed, as I've chronicled on this blog, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit used to get summarily reversed with some frequency in habeas cases.) Yet as Adam Liptak notes in the New York Times, summary reversals are less common than they used to be.
During the first fifteen years of the Roberts Court, there were seven or more summary reversals per term on average. Over the past four terms, however, the Court has averaged only one. Notes Liptak, this "decline is a mystery."
The reasons for the sharp shift away from summary reversals are unclear. The court may be too busy with major cases to correct errors in minor ones, or the justices may feel swamped by the spike in emergency applications.
