Author: alaskaadmin

Each June, the nation turns its attention to the U.S. Supreme Court as it hands down some of its most consequential decisions.

Long before a landmark Supreme Court ruling dominates the headlines, it is shaped by a highly structured legal process, much of which takes place out of public view. This procedure involves strict gatekeeping rules, a series of private conferences, written briefs, oral arguments and, finally, the announcement of an opinion.

As a legal and Supreme Court scholar, I know that understanding how the nation’s highest court actually makes policy requires stepping into this exceptionally regulated, sometimes hidden routine. It is through this process that the court evaluates, and eventually decides, increasingly high-stakes cultural and political battles.

Here’s how it all unfolds:

The agenda-setting process

The Supreme Court is a reactive institution. This means that it must wait for individuals, businesses, governments and the like to bring cases to the court before it can issue a ruling.

The way this most commonly works is that the party who loses in a lower court files a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court. This is a legal document that outlines why the court should review the case. The party who won in the lower court can file a brief in opposition, arguing that the lower court made the right decision and therefore the case does not warrant Supreme Court review.

Sometimes, interest groups weigh in by filing amicus curiae, or “friend of the court” briefs. Amicus briefs help signal that a case has broad national importance. The court is more likely to review cases accompanied by amicus briefs.

In recent years, the high court has received about 4,000 of these petitions per term, and it decides less than 80 cases. This means the odds of getting the court to hear any given case are quite small – about 2%.

To handle the large volume of petitions, the justices rely heavily on their law clerks. These are young lawyers – typically only a few years out of law school – who write short memos for the justices recommending that they grant or deny each petition.

On most Fridays throughout their term, the justices meet to discuss these petitions. This is a private conference with only the nine justices in attendance. Here, the court employs a rule of four: It takes the votes of four out of the nine justices to agree to review a case.

Following the conference, the court releases its list of cases granted and denied certiorari, known as the orders of the court. For cases denied certiorari, the lower court decision stands. Cases granted certiorari move onto the merits stage.

Legal briefs and oral arguments

The primary way the parties to a case try to persuade the justices is through their legal briefs. The petitioner, who lost in the lower court, tries to convince the justices that the lower court made some sort of legal error that should be reversed. The respondent, the lower court winner, argues that the lower court decision was correct and should be affirmed.

Interest groups, businesses and other interested entities that aren’t parties to the case can weigh in through a second type of amicus curiae brief. These briefs often highlight the public policy implications of a case, and they provide a way for these groups to pursue their ideological goals.

In recent terms, there has been an average of about 16 amicus briefs per case. And some cases see more than 100 amicus briefs, such as in Obergefell v. Hodges, the court’s 2015 same-sex marriage case, which had 148 briefs.

After briefing, oral arguments take place. Most oral arguments take an hour, with the time divided evenly between the petitioner and respondent. During oral arguments, the justices pepper the attorneys with questions and frequently preview how they might vote in the case.

Conference and votes

A few days after oral arguments, the justices meet again in a private conference to discuss cases and cast preliminary votes. The chief justice speaks first, followed by the rest of the court in order of seniority.

A majority forms in this conference, although the justices are free to change their votes until the opinion is announced, and occasionally do so.

Perhaps most importantly, a justice in the majority is assigned to draft the majority opinion. If the chief justice is in the court’s majority, the chief makes the opinion assignment. The chief justice can assign the opinion to another justice in the majority or to himself. If the chief justice is in the minority, the most senior justice in the majority makes the opinion assignment.

Majority opinions typically go through a series of revisions, as justices bargain and negotiate over its content. They do this by providing written feedback to the majority opinion author. If a justice in the court’s initial majority grows unhappy with the content of the draft opinion, they can defect by joining the minority.

In addition to the majority opinion, justices may write concurring and dissenting opinions. Concurring opinions are written by justices in the majority and are often used to highlight a different legal basis for the court’s decision. Dissenting opinions are written by justices who are in the minority and disagree with the outcome of the case and the majority’s reasoning.

Releasing opinions

The final step is the public release and announcement of the court’s opinions. This occurs on a rolling basis throughout the court’s term – from October to late June or early July – but the most important cases usually come down in June.

During opinion announcement, the majority opinion author usually reads a summary of the court’s opinion. On rare occasions, dissenting justices may read from their opinions. Reading a dissent from the bench signals that a justice is particularly unhappy with the majority’s decision.

For instance, on June 29, 2023, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read from her fiery dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College. In that opinion, Sotomayor criticized the court’s majority for effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions. According to Sotomayor, affirmative action programs are constitutional because they help to achieve the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of racial equality by mitigating the enduring effects of racial discrimination.

The blockbuster rulings that dominate the news cycle each June are not sudden flashes of judicial willpower. They are the product of a lengthy and carefully structured process in which thousands of petitions are screened, less than 80 cases are argued, and draft opinions are negotiated and refined behind closed doors. By the time a decision is announced from the bench, it reflects months of legal argument, deliberation and compromise.

Understanding that process helps demystify the court and reveals how nine unelected justices can shape the meaning of the Constitution and, in turn, influence the everyday lives of millions of Americans.

Paul M. Collins Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Declaration of Independence, with its block of cursive letters scrawled onto parchment, looks like a relic from the distant past. Likewise, you might think the 27 grievances against King George III, his government and the British people listed in the body of the document would have little relevance to our lives today.

After all, what could the specific complaints of colonists in 1776 have to do with 2026? The parts of the declaration worth knowing about are the soaring sentences in the opening paragraphs about self-evident truths, pursuing happiness and all men being created equal. Right?

I’m a professor of history, and I have been researching the Declaration of Independence for nearly a quarter-century. The document has been featured prominently in the four books I have written on the founding of the U.S., especially the recently published “Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence.”

In my assessment, the issues that most disturbed the Revolution’s leaders in 1776 are ones Americans are still concerned about today: a partisan judiciary, arbitrary power, officials not being responsible to their constituents, people lacking a voice in decisions that affect their families, and even policies about immigration and citizenship. Moreover, studying the grievances reveals how the Revolution depended on ordinary Americans. Without their political outrage and participation in the rebellion, American independence would have failed.

Where does authority come from? What are the limits of force, coercion and power? To whom are public officials beholden, and who decides the rule of law? What if these problems were to escalate into violence – or even civil war? These are 21st-century problems as much as they were 18th-century ones.

The colonists’ red lines

The declaration’s opening sentences are among the most famous written, but there are powerful statements further down, too, identifying what colonists in 1776 could not tolerate.

In the declaration, the colonists discuss the king’s effort to make “the military independent of and superior to the civil power.” For example, when Rhode Islanders complained about how the British ship Gaspee was attacking their ships without mercy in its hunt for smugglers, the Royal Navy waved away the colonial government.

The Declaration of Independence also featured threats to the courts: the king’s attempt to make “judges dependent on his will alone,” and Parliament “depriving” Americans “of the benefits of trial by jury.” Parliament was also “taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.”

For example, in 1774, in response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament had stripped Massachusetts of its colonial charter and revamped its government, making many elected positions appointed instead.

These were the grounds of revolution in 1776 and what colonists held to be the markings of a tyrant.

The people in the margins

Reading the grievances also illuminates a diverse cast of characters, one different from the 56 white men who signed the declaration, of whom nearly all were wealthy and of whom the majority had been enslavers.

When we learn the stories behind the declaration’s grievances, we find people of color hiding in plain sight, and not just in Thomas Jefferson’s notorious reference to “merciless Indian savages” in the final charge. African Americans and Indigenous peoples were making their presence felt and voices heard in the years before the Revolutionary War.

For example, the declaration’s final charge refers to “domestic insurrections.” “Domestics” was an 18th-century euphemism for enslaved people. This was Congress’ way of including a reference to Lord Dunmore’s emancipation proclamation, which promised freedom to enslaved people who joined the British. Historians estimate that at least 1,000 people reached Dunmore and freedom. Many more tried.

In several other seemingly unrelated grievances – like the king’s use of the royal veto, impressment, and the collapse of the judiciary – minority groups shaped the declaration. The 7th grievance, for example, is about the king preventing immigration to the colonies. But when it says he was “raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands,” it is really about Indigenous people; in fact, no reference to land in America could be about anything else. Those “conditions” included the Proclamation Line of 1763, a policy crafted to protect the boundaries of Native lands. That measure was the result of Indigenous people fighting to defend their homes for more than a decade.

The crowd behind the cause

Ordinary men and women in colonial cities and the countryside are behind the screen of the declaration’s list of charges too. The revolutionary movement could not have gained momentum otherwise.

Rowdy behavior lurks behind what seem like antiquated phrases like, in the 10th grievance, “swarms of officers” sent to eat the colonists’ substance, a reference taken from the Bible and applied to the dozens of customs officers sent to Boston in the late 1760s.

Most Americans today are familiar with some of the famous examples, like Bostonians dumping tea in the harbor in response to the Tea Act of 1773. But everyday people expressed their political outrage time and again, throwing rocks at and demolishing the houses of government officials, torching the king’s ships and forts and, eventually, marching to battle.

Those swarms? They caused significant unrest in Boston that culminated in paving stones being hurled at British officers and one of their boats being burned on Boston Common.

The grievances demonstrate the widespread, sustained fury that Britain’s imperial reforms produced in the colonies and present a more comprehensive – and complicated – view of the U.S. at the moment of its birth.

The men behind the king’s design

From the distance of 250 years, it is natural that Americans have largely forgotten the individuals the colonists held responsible for inflicting such pain. Thomas Jefferson and Congress focused on a tyrant king in the declaration, but George III had all sorts of assistants who, they argued, conspired to injure the American people.

These include members of the king’s cabinet, such as the Lords North, Hillsborough and Mansfield; and military officers such as General Thomas Gage, Lieutenant William Dudingston and Admiral Samuel Graves. Americans today probably haven’t heard of most of these people, but they were household names in 1776.

They also include appointed officials, such as royal governors Josiah Martin, Lord Dunmore and William Tryon, who went to battle against North Carolina farmers protesting taxes and corrupt officials.

To modern Americans, the grievances may seem abstract and devoid of life, but for the colonists, the grievances had faces. Behind each charge was a person enacting the king’s design. The Revolution’s leaders became convinced that the actions of these officials made it impossible for the 13 colonies to remain in the British Empire. They feared that if they did not take this step toward independence, Americans would lose the ability to seek justice, make their voices heard or enjoy representative government.

In 1825, Jefferson described the Declaration of Independence as an “expression of the American mind.” The grievances were part of that – challenges that ordinary men and women of all backgrounds had faced. Americans today can still learn from how they responded.

Robert Parkinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Independent journalist Derek Sherwood submitted a records request in Centre County, Pennsylvania, in January 2026. He requested an autopsy report related to a 1987 cold case that he was researching for a book project.
After Coroner Scott Sayers denied the request, Sherwood successfully appealed to the Office of Open Records, or OOR, a state agency responsible for adjudicating Right-To-Know Law disputes.

But Sayers still refused to release the report.

On May 14, the day before he was legally required to comply with the OOR’s decision, Sayers obtained a temporary court injunction that shielded the autopsy report from release.

Around the same time, PennLive reporter Jenna Wise requested three autopsy reports related to a 2025 crime spree from Susquehanna County Coroner Jessica Chiaramonte. Like Sayers, Chiaramonte also denied the request and then filed motions with the Court of Common Pleas to seal the reports.

And when I contacted Clearfield County Coroner Kim Shaffer-Snyder in May to request autopsy reports for three men who died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, I was quoted US$2,100 for a short stack of printed pages.

These experiences reflect a wider pattern. In counties across Pennsylvania, coroners routinely refuse to make autopsy reports and other records available to members of the public.

Coroners’ reasons for this are inconsistent and often unclear. Sometimes they say that releasing autopsy reports would jeopardize ongoing law enforcement activities. Sometimes they cite medical privacy standards that do not apply to autopsy reports. And sometimes they don’t provide any reasoning at all.

When coroners do agree to release their records, they charge as much as $700 per case. These fees place autopsy reports out of reach for most requesters, including journalists and researchers like me.

I’m a postdoctoral fellow studying the impacts of mass incarceration on medicine and public health. I’m also a freelance reporter who uses public records to understand what goes on behind the walls of prisons and jails.

In 2022 I partnered with colleague Terence Keel, a professor of human biology and society, to systematically request autopsy reports related to hundreds of deaths in prisons and jails across Pennsylvania.

We submitted requests in over three dozen counties. Then we waited. And waited.

Our plan was to conduct a rigorous statewide study of deaths in custody. Instead, we discovered that autopsy reports are not nearly as public in practice as Pennsylvania law requires.

What PA state law requires

The Pennsylvania County Code provides two pathways through which members of the public can obtain autopsy reports and other coroners records.

First, a requester can obtain them directly from the coroner through the payment of statutory fees. This is the only option available if a requester wants an autopsy report that was produced during the current calendar year.

In most places, however, these fees do not apply to older reports. In all counties with fewer than 500,000 residents, the law requires coroners to deposit the past year’s records with the county prothonotary at the beginning of each new year. The prothonotary is an independent elected official who serves as a designated record-keeper, among other duties.

Once in the prothonotary’s custody, all coroners records are to be made available “for the inspection of interested members of the public” – no fees required. This is the second way a requester can obtain an autopsy report in Pennsylvania.

But the state’s largest jurisdictions, including Philadelphia collar counties such as Bucks, Montgomery and Delaware, are exempt from this requirement. Requesters in those counties must pay the statutory fees no matter how old the requested autopsy report may be.

Due to carve-outs like this, autopsy reports in the counties with the most jail deaths are least accessible to public review.

Philadelphia and Allegheny counties

Philadelphia County and Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, are the only jurisdictions in Pennsylvania to have a chief medical examiner. Unlike a coroner, who is typically elected by the people, a medical examiner is appointed by the county executive or health commissioner.

In a landmark 2023 case brought by journalist Brittany Hailer, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office was subject to the same public release requirements as coroners elsewhere in the state.

Hailer had requested the autopsy report for Daniel Pastorek, a 63-year-old man who died in Allegheny County Jail in 2020 without leaving behind a documented next of kin. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office denied Hailer’s request on the basis that she was not related to Pastorek, and their policy was to release autopsy reports only to next of kin. But the Commonwealth Court ruled that Hailer was entitled to pay the fees and receive Pastorek’s autopsy report, regardless of her identity.

When Hailer finally obtained the report, she found that the medical examiners never performed a full autopsy. They merely viewed Pastorek’s body, then declared that he died of natural causes.

But the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office is not subject to this ruling. Philadelphia, as the state’s largest county by population, is carved out of the section of the Pennsylvania County Code known as the Coroner’s Act.

The Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office releases autopsy reports only to next of kin or in response to a subpoena.

James Garrow, communications director for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, which oversees the Medical Examiner, described this to me in a June 2026 email as “a policy decision.”

The Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office has made no changes to its policies in light of Hailer v. Allegheny County, Garrow added, citing the Coroner’s Act carve-out and the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter of 1951, which eliminated the office of the coroner.

High fees, but ‘no discretion’ – in theory

Pennsylvania law establishes high fees for coroners’ records – $500 per autopsy report, plus an additional $100 each for toxicology and coroner–investigator reports.

By comparison, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner charges a total of $32 for a comprehensive report that includes all three.

But the hefty price tag in Pennsylvania comes with an unambiguous guarantee.

In a 2012 decision called Hearst Television Inc. v. Norris, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that if a requester pays the fee, the coroner must provide the requested record. The coroner has “no discretion” in such cases, the court ruled.

Yet when Keel and I tried to obtain autopsy reports in 2022, coroners in 21 counties failed to respond to our requests at all. This is despite the fact that Pennsylvania’s Right-To-Know Law requires county officials to acknowledge receipt of all requests within five business days.

Another three coroners acknowledged receipt of our requests but stopped responding to us when we tried to make arrangements to view or collect the reports.

And coroners in 10 counties, including Beaver, Centre, Chester, Dauphin, Indiana and York, denied our requests outright.

We appealed to the Office of Open Records, which consistently ruled in our favor and characterized one coroner’s legal arguments as “frivolous.”

Defying the public deposit requirement

The Coroner’s Act stipulates that in counties with fewer than 500,000 residents, the coroner must deposit “all official records and papers for the preceding year in the office of the prothonotary” for “the inspection of interested members of the public.”

But of the 41 counties we contacted in 2022, only in three was the prothonotary or the county open records officer actually in possession of autopsy reports and able to release them to us.

Some coroners seemed to be unaware of their duty to deposit their records with the prothonotary, telling us they had never done so. Other coroners told us that they had entered into agreements with their local prothonotaries about retaining custody of their records. Such agreements have no clear statutory basis under the County Code.

Still other coroners, however, tried to use the gap between the law and their offices’ practices to stymie our requests.

Sayers, for example, claimed that his office’s autopsy reports were all in the custody of the prothonotary. He suggested we use Webia – Centre County’s online records retrieval system – to locate them.

Webia is a pay-to-use database. It requires a payment simply to set up an account, and it automatically collects a fee for each search a user performs. After a few days of costly and tedious searching, we concluded that Sayers had misled us.

The Office of Open Records agreed.

“There is no evidence that the requested autopsy and toxicology reports were ever deposited with the County Prothonotary,” the appeals officer wrote. “The practical effect is that any requester … is left to obtain them, at great cost,” by paying the statutory fees, he added.

A similar story unfolded in Dauphin County. Coroner Graham Hetrick denied our request and told us to look for autopsy reports at the prothonotary’s office, despite never having deposited them there.

After the OOR accused him of acting “in violation of the public interest,” Hetrick finally released the autopsy reports we requested.

Sayers, however, appealed the OOR’s determination to the Centre County Court of Common Pleas. We didn’t have the resources to fight the case, and the court ruled in Sayers’ favor.

The judge’s 95-word opinion did not address any of the matters raised in the OOR’s 11-page final determination, including the appeals officer’s conclusion that “the County, based upon the actions of its Coroner, may have acted in bad faith.”

I contacted Hetrick and Sayers last year to ask for their responses to the OOR’s criticisms. Neither responded. I reached out to Sayers in June 2026 with a more detailed list of questions, but again he did not respond.

Only 3 of 41 counties readily provided reports

Of the 41 counties we contacted, only Lancaster, Lebanon and Lehigh counties released the autopsy reports we requested without attempting to charge us the statutory fees or requiring us to appeal the matter to the OOR.

In two of those counties – Lancaster and Lehigh – previous court decisions explicitly ordered the coroners to deposit autopsy reports with the prothonotary.

During the 2023-24 legislative session, the Pennsylvania State Coroners’ Association worked with state representative Carol Hill-Evans (D-York) to introduce a bill that would have eliminated the public deposit requirement entirely. Michael Kriner, a registered consultant for the PSCA, confirmed the association’s involvement in an email to me last year.

The proposal never made it out of committee.

In counties with fewer than 500,000 residents – that’s currently 60 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties – the coroner is still required to deposit all autopsy reports and other records for the preceding year with the prothonotary.

That’s the law, whether coroners follow it or not.

The Conversation U.S. reached out to the Pennsylvania State Coroners’ Association to ask why coroners across the state are withholding autopsy reports and failing to deposit their records with the prothonotary. The Conversation U.S. also asked for clarification on the association’s position regarding the release of autopsy reports in exchange for the payment of fees.

The PSCA did not respond.

A ‘united front effort’ to prevent release

In February 2023, after more than six months of fighting for autopsy reports in numerous Pennsylvania counties, Keel and I obtained a batch of emails through a Right-To-Know Law request that shed light on what was happening behind the scenes.

Within days of receiving our request for autopsy reports in June 2022, Sayers contacted the Pennsylvania State Coroners’ Association to ask for guidance.

“Can you find out if any other coroners received a request like this?” Sayers wrote in an email to Scott Grim, a former Lehigh County coroner who was then the PSCA’s executive director.

A few days later, Susan Shanaman, then an attorney for the PSCA, sent an email to a list of numerous recipients, including dozens of sitting coroners. She suggested that coroners take the maximum extension allowed by law before responding to our requests, since they contained “unique issues … such as the requests seem to be all related to police-involved shootings and deaths in prison.”

Later, in another email, Shanaman suggested “that the requests be denied.”

In yet another email, Shanaman wrote, “I did a little more digging.” She attached a magazine article describing Keel’s research about jail deaths in Los Angeles. “A legacy of confronting injustice,” read the headline. This material, wrote Shanaman, “speaks of the goal to find racism in death investigations.”

A few months later, Chester County Coroner Sophia Garcia-Jackson sent an email to the same list. “If any other counties are dealing with the right to know UCLA Terrence Keel appeal with the Office of Open records, can you please reach out to me directly,” Garcia-Jackson wrote.

“My Solicitor and I would like to discuss a united front effort to prevent these records from being released,” she added.

Garcia-Jackson’s “united front effort” did not succeed.

In December 2023, the Commonwealth Court ruled in Terence Keel v. Chester County Office of the Coroner that Garcia-Jackson had no legal basis upon which to withhold the autopsy reports we requested.

We won.

The OOR now cites the case, alongside Hailer v. Allegheny County, when it orders coroners to turn over autopsy reports.

Despite this victory in court, however, the records we requested remained inaccessible to us in practice. The ruling affirmed the public character of autopsy reports, but it did not comment on the coroner’s failure to deposit them with the prothonotary.

Our only option was to obtain the records directly from Garcia-Jackson’s office. In June 2024, she informed us through an attorney that her office would charge the full statutory fee for each report, plus an additional duplication fee.

At least 14 people died in the custody of Chester County between 2008 and 2021. Autopsies were performed on 12 of them. If we want to study those cases, we will have to pay the coroner $7,520.

That total includes only autopsy and toxicology reports. Getting coroner-investigator reports could cost another $1,200 or more.

I contacted Garcia-Jackson, Grim and Shanaman in March 2025 to ask for their comments on the contents of their emails. None responded.

I also reached out to PSCA president and Washington County coroner Tim Warco to ask whether the PSCA helped to coordinate a statewide effort to prevent the release of autopsy reports to Keel and me.

He didn’t respond either.

Breaking the law – and public trust

In Pennsylvania, the public’s right to review autopsy reports is protected by state law. Yet many coroners do not welcome public oversight.

The autopsy report Sherwood requested in Centre County remains temporarily sealed. The court will hold a hearing at a later date to determine whether this seal can be permanent.

The court in Susquehanna County ruled in Wise’s favor. She obtained the three autopsy reports in April and has since put them to use in a major investigation published on PennLive.

After Shaffer-Snyder quoted me $2,100 in response to my query about the three men who died in ICE custody, I asked whether the relevant autopsy reports had been deposited with the prothonotary, as required by law. She did not answer the question.

Instead, Shaffer-Snyder told me I could travel from California to her office in Clearfield County to view the reports in person. But I would not be allowed to duplicate them in a manner consistent with news reporting or academic research.

“There will be no electronic devices permitted to be present while the files are being reviewed,” she wrote in an email, without providing an explanation or legal justification.

When coroners attempt to shield autopsy reports from scrutiny, they’re not just violating the public trust. Often, they’re also breaking the law.

This article was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Jonah Walters does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation