As the post notes, there *was* a decline in paid cases between the 1990s and the early 2000s. But by the mid-2000s, the total paid docket had stabilized between 1481 and 1741 (with some back-and-forth between those poles), a range encompassing *every* term between OT03 and OT21. Just to say that slightly differently, if your baseline is the early 2000s (and treating OT2022 as an outlier), there just hasn't been anywhere near the kind of drop-off in paid cases that would explain the drop-off in rulings in paid cases.
And if the point is that paid cases have declined significantly since the 1990s, that's undoubtedly *true*; it just doesn't explain why the Court's output of merits rulings has declined so significantly only in the last few years.
My chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQV-ST2UWm0b8HMSFb6CHc9fNCvJvfdTAcww7CaRa5WrhqEpQi6_60iq4x6X8bcjTYBBCjxF4nb6xYf/pubchart?oid=1804057280&format=interactive
As I just responded on Twitter:
As the post notes, there *was* a decline in paid cases between the 1990s and the early 2000s. But by the mid-2000s, the total paid docket had stabilized between 1481 and 1741 (with some back-and-forth between those poles), a range encompassing *every* term between OT03 and OT21. Just to say that slightly differently, if your baseline is the early 2000s (and treating OT2022 as an outlier), there just hasn't been anywhere near the kind of drop-off in paid cases that would explain the drop-off in rulings in paid cases.
And if the point is that paid cases have declined significantly since the 1990s, that's undoubtedly *true*; it just doesn't explain why the Court's output of merits rulings has declined so significantly only in the last few years.