A field guide to the shadow docket’s daylight cousin
The Cert Funnel
Nearly everything the Supreme Court is asked to do, it declines to do — silently. This page follows every petition through the machine.
Each Term roughly five thousand parties petition the Court to hear their case; the Justices agree to hear fewer than a hundred. What follows traces that attrition end to end: from docketing, to the Justices’ private conference, through relists, to the quiet one-line order that ends almost all of them.
- Docketed
- A petition arrives and gets a case number. “OT2025” is the Term that opened in October 2025.
- Conference
- The Justices’ private meeting (most Fridays in season) where they vote on which cases to hear. No outsiders attend; no reasons are given.
- Relist
- The Justices looked at a petition at conference and, instead of granting or denying, rolled it to the next conference for another look.
- GVR
- Granted, Vacated, Remanded: a one-line order sending a case back to the lower court for a fresh look — usually in light of a new decision — without briefing or argument.
- IFP
- In forma pauperis — filed by someone who cannot afford the $300 filing fee, most often a prisoner without a lawyer.
OT2026 — the term in progress
Data as of July 21, 2026. Petitions from this term are still being docketed and decided; 211 are still waiting on an outcome.
The complete picture: OT2017–OT2023
36,746 petitions across 7 completed Terms. This is what normally happens.
Two very different doors
Petitioners who can pay the $300 filing fee and printing costs file on the “paid” docket. Prisoners and others who cannot afford it file in forma pauperis (IFP). The machine treats the two piles very differently:
Paid (10,855 petitions)
Granted: 4.2% — 1 in 24
In forma pauperis (25,891 petitions)
Granted: 0.1% — 1 in 809
These are descriptive base rates, not causes: the two dockets carry very different kinds of cases, not just different filing fees.
What a relist is worth
Court-watchers treat the relist as the strongest public signal at this stage: it means at least someone in the building gave the petition a second look. Across OT2017–OT2023, here is what happened to decided petitions that reached at least one conference, grouped by how many times they were relisted:
| Petitions | Granted | GVR’d | Denied | Dismissed | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Never relisted | 32,015 | 0.4% | 0.6% | 96.2% | 2.9% |
| Relisted 1× | 3,736 | 6.1% | 5.8% | 87.6% | 0.5% |
| Relisted 2× | 289 | 24.9% | 16.6% | 57.1% | 1.4% |
| Relisted 3× | 166 | 12.7% | 32.5% | 54.8% | 0.0% |
| Relisted 4× | 58 | 34.5% | 13.8% | 50.0% | 1.7% |
| Relisted 5+× | 172 | 11.0% | 14.0% | 74.4% | 0.6% |
Petitions relisted once or twice were granted far more often than never-relisted ones. Petitions relisted many times usually met a different fate: most were being held for another case already under review, and usually ended in a GVR or a denial once that case came down. History, not prophecy: none of this predicts any particular case.
How rarely anyone even responds
The other side often does not bother: across OT2017–OT2023, a brief in opposition was filed in only 19.7% of cases (7,222). The Court itself asked for a response — a signal someone took interest — in 5.9% (2,160). And outside groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting or opposing review in just 6.2% (2,295).
Follow the machine
- The daily docket — every new petition and application, as it arrives.
- Conference reports — what the Justices consider at each private conference, sorted by relists.
- Built entirely from the public docket entries on supremecourt.gov. Docket data shows process, not reasons: the Court explains almost nothing at this stage, and neither do we.
- A petition belongs to the Term of its docket number; outcomes are attributed to that Term even when they arrive in the next one. A granted case that is later dismissed or dropped still counts as granted.
- A relist is a redistribution with no intervening “Rescheduled” entry and no intervening call for a response (those redistributions are mechanical). Counting naively would overstate relists by more than half.
- The “GVR’d” bucket is summary dispositions: overwhelmingly grant-vacate-remand orders, plus a handful of summary reversals and summary affirmances. “Dismissed” includes settlements, procedural dismissals, and administrative closures (most often an unpaid filing fee).
- Emergency applications (the “A” docket) are excluded here; they are a different machine.
- Baseline Terms pooled: OT2017, OT2018, OT2019, OT2020, OT2021, OT2022, OT2023. Terms are pooled only when fewer than 1.5% of petitions lack a recognized outcome (excluded as incomplete: OT2024).
- Rows with fewer than 25 petitions are suppressed in the relist table; small percentages inside surviving rows can reflect a handful of cases. All rates are descriptive history, not predictions about any pending case.
- Code and data .