Court Overload

For more than a decade the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have been complaining that they are overworked, and Chief Justice Warren Burger has recently renewed his call for a national appeals court to help relieve the burden. But is the work load really so heavy? Well, yes, answer a bevy of new scholarly articles, but the fault lies with the Justices.

Perhaps the most experienced critic is former Justice Arthur Goldberg, who writes in the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly that the high court could save considerable time if the Justices were less verbose in their opinions, concurrences and dissents, and if they screened more efficiently the 4,000 petitions for review they receive every year.

The most voluminous censure will fill at least two future issues of the New York University Law Review. The study, by N.Y.U. Law Professors Samuel Estreicher and John Sexton, applies a microscope to the cases considered by the court in its 1982-83 term. Its most striking conclusion: nearly one-fourth of the cases decided (39 out of 165) were not worth the Justices' time. The high court should deal only with the most important and vexing issues, the scholars say, rather than merely correct the errors of lower courts.