[ Report Home | Previous Page | Next Page ] Pay to Play V. Paying To Play D. Big Donors Had Highest Acceptance Rates

Not only do contributing petitioners enjoy an advantage in the Supreme Court but there is a strong correlation between this advantage and the amount of political money contributed. While the average overall petition-acceptance rate was 11 percent, this rate leapt to an astonishing 56 percent for petitioners who contributed more than $250,000 to the justices. In contrast, non-contributing petitioners enjoyed an acceptance rate of just 5.5 percent.  For every contribution level studied, there was a direct correlation between the amount of money contributed and the court’s petition-acceptance rate.
 

The average petitioner who gave the court $250,000 or more was 10 times more likely than the average non-contributor to have a petition accepted. The average petitioner who gave the court $100,000 or more was 7.5 times more likely than the average non-contributor to have a petition accepted. Across the board, the more a petitioner gave, the greater the likelihood that the court would accept a given petition.

The remainder of this section of the report takes a look at how these same trends particularly apply to petitioning law firms and to petitioning parties. For this discussion, the analysis will shift from the 3,942 individual petitions studied in this report to each filing made by every petitioner. There are many more petitioner filings than petitions because a single petition can involve multiple attorneys, law firms and parties.