Will It Get Oral Argument?

The South Dakota Supreme Court term runs from August through May of the following year.  Throughout that term, the Court meets eight times:  August, September/October, November, January, February, March, April, and May.  During each meeting, the Court not only considers select cases on which it has chosen to hear oral arguments, but it also considers a number of other cases “on their briefs.”

I am often asked whether a case will be afforded the privilege of being argued before the Court.  Unfortunately, this question comes with no easy answers.  However, in an effort to provide a better answer that question, I have compiled the following statistics from the Court’s publicly available calendars from the last three terms:

On average, over the last three years, attorneys in only 14.87% of cases have been afforded the privilege of oral argument, and attorneys in 85.13% of cases have not.  Of course, these averages cannot predict the likelihood that a particular case will be chosen for argument as that decision likely turns on the facts and issues of each case.

Unfortunately, that question has no clear answer.  This table shows the types of cases that have been afforded oral argument in the last year:

While few cases have been chosen for argument this year, this graph indicates that a wide-variety of cases are chosen.  Rather than focusing on the type of case, it seems reasonable to assume that whether a case is chosen for oral argument depends more on the novelty of the legal issue than the case’s particular subject matter.  Thus, to answer the question whether your case will be chosen for oral argument, your best bet is to ask yourself whether your case involves significant questions of first impression and whether its outcome will have a lasting impact on cases that come after it.  If the objective answer to those questions is “yes,” then it is more likely that your case will be granted oral argument. Questions? Call our Sioux Falls, Sioux City, or Omaha office today.