Judge Richard Posner Say Supreme Court Not a Real Court But a Quasi-Political Body

According to a Daily Beast interview of Judge Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said:

. . . I don’t like the Supreme Court. I don’t think it’s a real court. I think of it as basically…it’s like a House of Lords. It’s a quasi-political body. President, Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court. It’s very political. And they decide which cases to hear, which doesn’t strike me as something judges should do. You should take what comes. When you decide which case to hear it means you’ve decided the cases ahead of time. Also, because I’m a compulsive writer, I like to write. The way we hear cases, we occasionally have cases that all the judges sit on, but most of the time, we’re sitting in panels of three judges, so we split up the case among three judges. Sometimes I assign myself a little more than a third, because I’m selfish. But if you sit with eight other people [like the Supreme Court] you only get 1/9th of the cases to write. I’m not interested in that. Now the Supreme Court justices write very, very few majority opinions. Last year they saw 74 cases. Divide that by 9 and that’s a little more than 8 opinions a year. That’s ridiculous! I write around 90 opinions a year. I think they get up to an average of about 20 opinions per justice total. I don’t enjoy writing dissenting and concurring opinions, because once the case is decided, there’s very little interest in these other opinions. I just wouldn’t enjoy the Supreme Court. Absolutely no desire to be on it. . . .