Rendell’s role in Third Circuit en banc cases, and another look at whether the court uses en banc rehearing ideologically

I posted here about yesterday’s blockbuster capital-habeas en banc ruling in Dennis v. Secretary. Here are a couple thoughts on what Dennis can tell us about the dynamics of the court.

Rendell’s outsized role in en banc cases

Often en banc opinion assignments in the Third Circuit are just based on panel assignments — that is, if an en banc majority member wrote a panel opinion, then that judge normally writes the en banc majority opinion. But in Dennis no judge in the en banc majority was on the original panel, because all three panel members were en banc dissenters. So Chief Judge McKee (the ranking judge in the majority and thus the majority authorship assigner) had more latitude than usual in choosing who to assign the opinion to, and he picked Rendell. I see that as the latest sign of the great esteem in which she is held by her colleagues on the court.

Judge Rendell’s pivotal role in the current court’s en banc cases goes beyond yesterday’s case. The court has decided 4 en banc cases in the past 12 months (Lewis, Langbord, NCAA, and Dennis), and Rendell wrote the majority opinion in 3 of the 4! In the fourth, she wrote the dissent. Of the court’s 22 en banc cases decided since McKee became Chief in 2010, Rendell wrote for the court five times — more than any other judge — and wrote the lead dissent 4 other times — also more than any other judge.

Remarkable.

Outlier-panel correction, revisited

In my big en banc-analysis post in May of 2015, I wrote:

Don’t expect the en banc court to trump an outlier panel. In some other circuits, en banc rehearing is often granted when the court’s majority wants to wipe out a ruling from an ideologically unrepresentative panel (like when you draw a panel with two liberals in a majority-conservative circuit). If that sort of nakedly ideological use of en banc rehearing happens in the Third Circuit these days at all, it is rare. It may have happened in Katzin, where Greenaway and Smith went from panel majority to en banc dissenters in an ideologically charged case. But even Katzin involved an important novel issue, not a garden-variety instance of we-disagree-with-the-panel. So, as far as I can tell, the court is honoring its IOP 9.3.3 claim that it does “not ordinarily grant rehearing en banc when the panel’s statement of the law is correct and the uncontroverted issue is solely the application of the law to the circumstances of the case.”

Four en banc cases have been issued since I wrote that, and 3 of the 4 effectively reversed the panel outcome. More interestingly, 2 of them look like what I said is rare, en banc majorities trumping outlier panels:

  • In Lewis, a panel majority of two Republican-nominated judges (Fisher with Chagares) issued a conservative ruling* (holding a criminal-trial error harmless). The court granted rehearing en banc and issued a liberal ruling, with every Democratic-nominated judge in the majority and three Republican-nominated judges dissenting.
  • In Dennis, a panel of three Republican-nominated judges (Fisher with Smith and Chagares) issued a conservative ruling (denying capital habeas relief). The court granted rehearing en banc and issued a liberal ruling, with every Democratic-nominated judge in the majority and four Republican-nominated judges dissenting.

* I’m using “conservative ruling” in these two bullets as shorthand for “ruling whose outcome conservatives traditionally favor.” Same idea with “liberal.”

What happened in Lewis and Dennis bears watching, but I still doubt it’s the new normal. Consider the other two en banc cases decided in the past year:

  • Langbord split the court’s Democratic-nominated judges, with four of them in the majority and three dissenting.
  • NCAA voting broke down non-ideologically, with liberal and conservative judges all in the majority and only Fuentes and Vanaskie dissenting.

There will never be enough en banc cases to draw robust conclusions from them about the court’s dynamics. The tiny sample size makes it impossible to tell the meaningful trends from the statistical blips.

Still, for appellate nerds, it’s fun to try.