Situated within a fifteen minute walk from the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit serves as the appellate court for the nation’s capital. It hears relatively few cases, especially compared to the larger Second, Ninth, and Fifth Circuits. Four current Supreme Court justices, and the current attorney general served here before their current role.
This analysis examines the judges who serve on the most prestigious Circuit Court and the cases they heard from January 2019 through June 2023, using a combination of Docket Alarm analytics and publicly-available information on the judges.
The Judges
Since 2019, twenty-one judges have heard cases at the D.C. Circuit. One judge, Brad Garcia, has yet to hear a case since his appointment in May. Over that time period, two, Judge Laurence Silberman and Judge Stephen Williams, passed away; one, Thomas Griffith, retired; and two, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Merrick Garland, were appointed to the Supreme Court and Attorney General’s Office respectively.
Of all twenty-three currently serving judges, four each were appointed by Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and Joe Biden, three each by Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, two by George H.W. Bush, and one each by Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush.
As to their backgrounds, the D.C. Circuit is tied with the Second Circuit for the highest percentage of judges who attended a Top 14 law school. Only two judges, Karen Henderson and David Sentelle, have not. No D.C. Circuit Judge attended a school in the District, though two, David Tatel and Ketanji Brown Jackson, were born there. Eight attended a public university. Harvard dominates in terms of alumni representation with 11, and no other school has more than three alumni on the court.
Case Types
According to PACER Nature of Suit Codes, a majority (62.8%) of D.C. Circuit cases have the United States as a defendant. 31.3% of the cases were private suits, 5.4% involved jurisdictional diversity, and the United States was a plaintiff in only 0.6% of cases.
The most common Nature of Suit (NOS) code was 2890 Other Statutory Actions, followed by 2440 Other Civil Rights, 2550 Prisoner – Civil Rights, 3440 Other Civil Rights, and 2442 Civil Rights – Jobs. Official Definitions for all NOS codes can be found here. In fact, 19.44% of all cases, across how they arrived in federal court, fell under the Other Statutory Actions heading.
One example of such a case was covered previously on Law Street. In said case, the Humane Society sued to block the Trump Administration from repealing an Obama-era regulation attempting to crack down on horse soring. The D.C. Circuit ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, stating that federal regulations are to be considered in effect when their final text is shared with the public, not when it is officially published in the registrar.
Parties
Unsurprisingly, various offices within the federal government are the most common parties within the D.C. Circuit. Topping the list is the United States as a whole, followed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The District of Columbia, itself, was also a party in a number of cases, usually as the defendant.
Firms
Outside of federal governmental law offices, such as the Department of Justice and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the most active firms in the Circuit are the Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, Earthjustice, Hogan Lovells, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Arnold & Porter. Earthjustice is of particular note, since they specialize exclusively in environmental law.