Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said the court’s justices unanimously agree on about 40 percent of cases, and “very little changes” when looking at the court’s history, in an interview with National Review released Monday.
The Supreme Court currently has a 6-3 majority of conservative justices. Despite the ideological split, the justices reached a unanimous ruling in 42 percent of cases in the 2024 term, according to the statistics by SCOTUSblog. However, that number is down from 44 percent in the previous term and 50 percent in the 2022 term.
“You’re thinking, well, what about those 5–4s, and 6–3s? OK, fine. That’s about a third of our docket, alright?” Gorsuch said. “But only about half of that third are the 5–4s and 6–3s you might imagine, and the rest of them are scrambled every which way. Alright, now those two figures, that 40 percent and that third, same as they were more or less in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt had appointed eight of the nine justices of the Supreme Court. So, the one thing I know about the Supreme Court is very little changes.”
Trust in the Supreme Court remains near historic lows, according to polling. A poll by NBC News released in March found that 22 percent of registered voters nationally said they have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the Supreme Court, 40 percent said they had “some” confidence and 38 percent said they had “very little” or “no” confidence. The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters from February 27 to March 3 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
A Gallup poll released in October of last year found that 49 percent of Americans say they trust the Supreme Court either “a great deal” (16 percent) or “a fair amount” (33 percent).
“That level of trust is among the lowest in Gallup’s trend, essentially matching the low point of 47 percent from 2022,” Gallup said.
President Donald Trump appointed Justices Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, helping to preserve the court’s conservative majority, but he has also recently voiced criticism of the court.
“Certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad, completely violating what they ‘supposedly’ stood for,” Trump said in a Truth Social post last month.
Gorsuch told the National Review that the justices “have different philosophies on how we approach the law, but I sit across from the table with people I know love this country.”
“We sit around and we listen. We don’t interrupt. There are no raised voices in the conference room ever, right? And I listen. They listen. We find where we can agree, and we’re able to become unanimous in cases the lower courts have disagreed on about 40 percent of the time,” Gorsuch said.
Gorsuch said that lower courts only disagree on the meaning of federal law in about 60 or 70 cases a year.
“One could argue there’s a few more, a few fewer or whatever, but it’s not that many. It’s kind of incredible. You can—you know your rights and duties in this country under the law, much more so than almost any place on the planet or in the history of the world,” Gorsuch said. “OK, fine. Of those 60–70 cases, the nine of us are unanimous about 40 percent of the time. Think about that. Think about what it takes. Am I ever going to convince Sonia Sotomayor to become an originalist? I kind of doubt it, right?”
He said about 50 million lawsuits are filed each year.
“You’re giving us stuff that’s hard, and you’re asking nine people from across the country, appointed by five different presidents over the course of 30 years, to work together to resolve those cases,” Gorsuch said.
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