Get Ready for the Noise Machine 0

Media Matters:

In covering the Ricci case, reversing Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s decision, media should not promote the myth that the reversal represents a “historic rebuke” or that Sotomayor’s Supreme Court reversal rate is “high.”

The bottom line is that the Supreme Court does not accept cases unless it thinks there is a legal issue worthy of consideration. This means that any case it accepts has a good chance of being reversed.

Further down the page, see the bottom line (emphasis added):

. . . it also would not be unprecedented for the court to reverse a ruling reached by a justice before his or her elevation to the Supreme Court. As an appeals court judge, Chief Justice John Roberts was a member of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which, in its July 2005 unanimous ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, alBaswed a military commission to try Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Guantánamo Bay detainee.

Roberts was confirmed as chief justice several months later, in September 2005. Then, in 2006, the Supreme Court reversed the circuit court’s decision on a 5-3 ruling.

Moreover, contrary to the myth that it is unusual for the Supreme Court to reverse federal appellate court decisions, data compiled by SCOTUSblog since 2004 show that the Supreme Court has reversed more than 67 percent of the federal appeals court cases it considered each year, except 2007, when it reversed federal appeals court cases 61 percent of the time.