Somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 petitions for a writ of certiorari arrive at the Supreme Court each year. Or so the court itself says.
The court is not alone. SCOTUSblog’s own “Supreme Court Procedure” page has long cited this number as “7,000 to 8,000.” The Georgetown Law Library’s research guide says that “over 8,000” cert petitions are filed in a typical year. The court’s 2023 Code of Conduct states that this number is “approximately 5,000 to 6,000.” The physical exhibit inside the court building notes that between 5,000 and 7,000 such petitions are submitted, while the National Constitution Center puts the number at around 10,000.
But the most recent year-end report released by Chief Justice John Roberts provides a different, strikingly lower number: according to this authoritative document, in the 2024-25 term, there were 3,856 petitions for review filed with the court. Of those petitions, more than half (2,527) were filed “in forma pauperis,” or “IFP,” which means that the litigant filing them was not required to pay the $300 filing fee or print the briefs in booklet form, while the remaining 1,329 were “paid” petitions.
According to prior year-end reports, that total has dropped by more than half since the 2006-07 term, when the volume of petitions filed reached a peak of 8,857. Filings remained relatively stable in the high 7,000s and low 8,000s throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s before beginning a steady decline in the 2013-14 term. In the 2015-16 term, the total dipped below 7,000 for the first time since at least 1998, and it continued falling through the end of the decade.
The drop then accelerated further. From 5,411 petitions in the 2019-20 term, filings fell below 5,000 by the 2021-22 term and below 4,500 the following term. A slight dip seen in 2019 (the 2019-20 term) and spike in 2020 (the 2020-21 term) is likely explained by the COVID-19 pandemic. (In March 2020, the court extended filing deadlines and granted extensions of time for filing both petitions and reply briefs – meaning many petitions that would have ordinarily been filed at the end of the 2019-2020 term (through the end of June 2020) were filed during the 2020-21 term.)
Overall, compiling the statistics from the chief justice’s year-end reports from 2000 through 2025 produces the following:
So what’s going on here?
Most strikingly, the long decline in petitions has largely centered on the IFP docket, which has decreased in size by nearly 65% since the 2006-07 term – from 7,132 to 2,527 in the 2024-25 term. The paid docket has proven somewhat more resilient, declining by slightly less than 23% over the same period.
Law professor Steve Vladeck was one of the first to highlight this trend. He did so in a September 2024 newsletter, prompted by remarks that Justice Neil Gorsuch had made at a conference for judges and lawyers from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. There, Gorsuch suggested that the court’s shrinking oral argument docket was a function of fewer petitions reaching the justices. “Maybe it had something to do with the pandemic and some lower courts were closed for long periods of time and perhaps there’s a backlog. Maybe it has something to do with appellate waivers in criminal cases. I don’t know,” Gorsuch said.
In response, Vladeck correctly noted, as described above, that the number of paid petitions (which make up almost all of the court’s cert grants) had “declined only marginally since the early 2000s,” and that “most of the decline in total appeals has come from the IFP docket.”
But why might that be the case?
IFP filings: Mostly chaff?
The IFP and paid dockets function very differently at the court. Although the paid petitions, as noted above, involve a significant investment of time and resources, IFP filings, by contrast, come from indigent litigants – often prisoners challenging their convictions or confinement conditions and representing themselves. As SCOTUSblog contributor Adam Feldman noted in a 2025 analysis, IFP petitions are typically granted “far less often” because many of these petitions raise fact-specific grievances without broader legal significance, do not present an issue on which the lower courts are divided, or revisit issues the justices have repeatedly declined to take up. Feldman also found that starting at the end of the 2022 term, 98.78% of IFP petitions were denied, compared to 85.97% of paid petitions. (For this reason, SCOTUSblog generally does not track unpaid petitions.)
Indeed, as far back as 1946, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone observed that IFP petitions “are mostly chaff.” Justice William Brennan, too, considered the overwhelming majority of IFP petitions to be “unworthy of full Court review.” Others outside the court have tended to agree. In practice, the modern court certainly still treats the IFP and paid dockets differently. One SCOTUS clerk said they “flip through [the IFP petitions] pretty fast.” And in a 2010 SCOTUSblog column, Kevin Russell noted that IFP petitions “tend to get buried in a sea of other, mostly meritless, pauper petitions.”
Having said that, IFP petitions produced such landmark cases as Gideon v. Wainwright, which found a constitutional right to counsel in state criminal cases, as well as Batson v. Kentucky, which determined that prosecutors cannot exercise peremptory challenges to eliminate jurors on the basis of race.
The narrowed pre-SCOTUS pipeline
There are numerous factors likely driving the drop in IFP petitions at the court.
Perhaps the most obvious reason is the sharp decline in IFP filings in the lower courts. Legal scholar Margo Schlanger has documented the effect of the 1996 enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, or PLRA, on the number of civil rights cases prisoners have filed in district courts.
The PLRA’s stated purpose was, among other things, to “provide for [alternative] remedies for prison condition lawsuits,” and “to discourage frivolous and abusive prison lawsuits” – in other words, to reduce the number of lawsuits filed by prisoners. Sen. Bob Dole, who introduced the bill, pointed to a host of what he described as such frivolous suits, including over insufficient locker space, missed wedding anniversary parties, and being served the wrong variety of peanut butter while incarcerated.
In attempting to accomplish this goal, the PLRA increased filing fees, capped attorneys’ fees at rates that made prisoner cases less attractive, limited recoverable damages to physical injuries, and imposed a three-strikes rule barring certain IFP petitions after three dismissed suits.
The statute appears to have succeeded in terms of deterring prison suits. In the year before the PLRA, prisoners filed 39,053 civil rights lawsuits, which translates to a rate of 24.6 per 1,000 prisoners. In 1997, a year after the PLRA’s enactment, filings had fallen to 26,095. From there, Schlanger notes that the per-prisoner filing rate kept declining and dropped to 10.5 per 1,000 by 2012, or less than half the pre-PLRA level. (After 2012, the amount of PLRA filings plateaued.)
But that is not all. Among the most common filings on the IFP docket are habeas corpus petitions, in which a prisoner asks a federal court to review whether their conviction or sentence violated the Constitution or federal law, with the ultimate goal of obtaining release, a new trial, or a reduced sentence. Because prisoners are rarely able to afford filing fees, habeas petitions are often filed IFP.
The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 made filing such petitions more difficult, adding additional barriers at the court of appeals level by imposing a one-year statute of limitations on habeas petitions and establishing a high bar for prisoners who do file such petitions to prevail. The law, known as AEPDA, also imposed a near-total ban on second or successive habeas petitions.
Finally, there is perhaps another reason why IFP petitions have dropped so dramatically: simple demographics. According to the Pew Research Center, the nation’s incarceration rate peaked at 1,000 inmates per 100,000 adults between 2006 and 2008, correlating to the time IFP filings peaked at 7,132 in 2006. Fewer prisoners mean a smaller pool of potential IFP petitioners, independent of any other structural or statutory change.
At the court itself
Those cases that overcome these barriers and attempt to reach the court face additional challenges. Vladeck and others have noted that “the Court has gotten stingier in granting IFP cases, especially since Justice [Anthony] Kennedy retired.”
In 1989, for example, the court barred Jessie McDonald – who had filed 73 petitions over 18 years – from proceeding IFP; four justices dissented from the decision. Two years later, the court imposed a similar bar on Michael Sindram, who had filed 43 petitions in three years; three justices dissented. In 1992, in In re Martin, the court extended the filing bar to cover all cert petitions in noncriminal matters for James Martin, who had filed 54 IFP petitions over a decade. Two justices dissented.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s solo dissent in Howell v. Circuit Court of Indiana in late January recounted this history and described what followed. Danny Howell, an Indiana prisoner serving 70 years, had filed six petitions over 14 years, his last one eight years before he was “Martinized” – the term given, as Jackson explained, to a ban on future IFP filings by indigent litigants. As Jackson explained, the court has now invoked Martin hundreds of times. In practice, this means the threshold for being permanently barred from IFP filings has steadily lowered.
Six weeks after its order in Howell, the court declined to lift another burden that made it more difficult for incarcerated individuals to file petitions. In Johnson v. High Desert State Prison, the court denied a petition for review in a challenge to the PLRA’s requirement that each prisoner in a joint lawsuit individually pay the full $350 filing fee rather than splitting it among co-plaintiffs. In her dissent from the denial of review, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Jackson, argued that the rule effectively removed one of the remaining ways for indigent prisoners with related claims to share the cost of access to the court.
The paid docket is a different story
As noted earlier, the paid docket has also declined, although far less dramatically than the IFP docket. Several tenuous explanations have been offered for this dip.
One possibility, raised by law professor Jonathan Adler, is that changes in the court’s ideological “composition” have influenced which cases attorneys choose to file. However, Adler writes, it is unclear why this would “produce an overall decline in [paid] cert petitions, as opposed to a shift in what sorts of petitions are filed,” given that the decrease in progressive petitions would presumably be “offset” by the increase in conservative ones.
A second possible reason, identified in a 2008 Georgetown Law Review article by Richard Lazarus, is that as the probability of getting a cert grant has decreased (because the court takes up fewer cases), so too has the willingness of parties to file paid petitions seeking review. Lazarus also suggests that the rise of elite Supreme Court advocates may itself discourage filings through what he calls a “screening function”: Because repeat players have a reputational stake before the court, they are more likely than other lawyers to steer clients away from pursuing review when they judge the chances of success to be low. Lazarus adds that retaining such top Supreme Court counsel to prepare a petition can cost upwards of $100,000, a price tag that may cause some parties to forgo filing altogether.
A third explanation comes from law professor Arthur Hellman, who has studied what happens prior to cases reaching a vote to grant or not. According to Hellman, most petitions never receive any collective attention from the justices at all – they are screened out by the clerks before conference and placed on what insiders call the “dead list,” denied without any discussion. Hellman’s research suggests that the pool of cases actually discussed by the justices – the “discuss list” – has itself shrunk, and that a smaller discuss list may signal to experienced Supreme Court practitioners that the bar for a serious look is higher than it once was, discouraging petitions that might previously have been worth the attempt.
Getting the number right
In his 1991 dissent in In re Demos, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote that “with each barrier that it places in the way of indigent litigants, … the Court can only reinforce in the hearts and minds of our society’s less fortunate members the unsettling message that their pleas are not welcome here.” Watson closed her 2006 study, which was written before the IFP docket had lost two-thirds of its volume, by warning that disparate treatment of the unpaid docket implicates “the administration of justice more broadly.”
At the same time, it can be argued that a leaner IFP docket is not, standing alone, cause for alarm. Proponents of the PLRA’s restrictions have contended that the statute served its intended purpose to reduce frivolous filings – filtering out petitions that, as the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist observed, are “patently without merit” and in which “no one of the nine [justices] would have the least interest in granting.” Defenders of the court’s tightened Martin doctrine could similarly argue that repeat filers with frivolous claims represent precisely the kind of litigation abuse that the court is entitled to curtail, allowing it to focus on those petitions with actual merit.
But what’s undeniable is that the number of filings has dropped dramatically, and especially from those with the least means. Whether or not one views that as a regrettable gap in justice or the result of improved efficiency to hear the claims that really matter, there is little doubt that this trend has profound implications for the court’s day-to-day docket and for the question of who, in practice, gets heard before the court and on what bases.
