Who Gets Heard? Permission to Appeal Decisions

Abstract

This chapter examines the “permission to appeal” (PTA) process at the Supreme Court. Each year more than two hundred litigants seek permission to appeal from the Supreme Court. Around one-third of these applications are successful. This chapter tries to explain rates of success. The key factors are the importance of the case the litigants are appealing, and the number of judges the appellants have convinced in lower courts. This matches the court’s own description of the cases it selects (“cases that raise arguable points of law of general importance”). However, the chapter also finds that governmental actors are more likely to gain permission to appeal even when controlling for importance and the balance of judicial opinion in lower courts.