口头辩论耗时过长，最高法院大法官们已忍无可忍

Oral arguments are taking forever. Supreme Court justices have had enough

2026-05-24T11:00:07.890Z / CNN

• Supreme Court justices are openly complaining that oral arguments have become too long and filled with speechifying.
• Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson speak the most during arguments on the court’s conservative-dominated bench.
• A pandemic-era compromise that blended questioning styles has made it harder to keep advocates and justices on the clock.

AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.

Like all good lawyers, Supreme Court justices can argue over anything — including, it turns out, how best to argue.

Quiet grumbling for years over how the court conducts its oral argument sessions has increasingly slipped into public view during a series of appearances by some of the justices.

“Way too long,” Chief Justice John Roberts complained recently to a conference of judges and lawyers in Pennsylvania, vowing to “look into it” over the summer.

“Too much speechifying,” Justice Samuel Alito piled on in Texas days later, according to SCOTUSblog, adding that he felt there was “too little asking real questions.”

The Supreme Court’s oral arguments, which begin each term in October and run through April, have long been understood by legal experts as only marginally important to determining the outcome of any given case. But the sessions nevertheless allow justices to test one another’s theories and, because of that, the arguments can influence the reach of a decision.

And for the public, the debates — which have been livestreamed only since the pandemic — offer a glimpse into how nine of the most powerful people in Washington are thinking about various appeals that often have national implications.

“It’s very important for the court’s legitimacy,” said Tonja Jacobi, a law professor at Emory University who has extensively studied arguments. “It can help reassure people that at least some of this is law.”

The impact of shortening the sessions could fall heaviest on the court’s liberal wing, if only because in recent terms, those three justices tend to speak the most on average.

During the pandemic, when the court switched to virtual arguments, the justices would ask questions in order of seniority rather than the free-form, “hot bench” style used for decades. When the justices returned to the physical courtroom in 2021, some wanted to retain seniority-based questioning while others pushed for a return to the faster-paced pre-pandemic system.

A compromise was struck that has been in place ever since: First free-form, then a round of “seriatim” questioning. But the format has made it harder to keep advocates and justices on the clock.

The Supreme Court schedules 60-minute argument sessions in most cases. But the justices in recent years have often blown past that timetable, a break from the days when former Chief Justice William Rehnquist would keep such a rigid approach to time that he would sometimes cut advocates off midsentence.

The average length of arguments in the current term clocked in at just under 90 minutes, according to a CNN analysis. That’s up nearly 10 minutes from the term that began in 2020, when the court heard arguments remotely because of the pandemic.

The longest argument of the term, at nearly three hours, was the case involving President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, which the court ultimately struck down.

That argument, which technically involved two appeals, was scheduled for 80 minutes.

Criticism of the current approach isn’t universal. Many Supreme Court attorneys — who are alerted to the clock by white and red lights on their podium — have said they appreciate the extra time, and the ability to talk one-on-one with justices in the “seriatim” round of questioning without interruption.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who for years famously never spoke during oral arguments, also has no objection.

“The current approach may run on a bit long, but you cannot say you have not had a chance to say your piece,” the court’s senior associate justice told a group of judges and lawyers gathered outside Miami recently.

“I don’t play golf. I don’t play cards. I don’t hang out. So, I can sit there all day,” Thomas joked at a conference organized by the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals on May 14. “I have no place to go.”

Members of the three-justice liberal bloc, operating on a court where conservatives hold a six-justice supermajority, are often struggling against the tide and, it turns out, talk more than their colleagues.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in particular, are among the most loquacious. Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal, spoke on average more than six minutes during arguments in the current term, according to an analysis by Adam Feldman, founder of Empirical SCOTUS, and Jake Truscott, a political science professor at the University of Florida.

Jackson, who as the least-senior justice gets the final say during each session of argument, spoke on average for more than eight minutes per argument.

By contrast, none of their colleagues spoke for more than five minutes on average.

Neither Sotomayor nor Jackson responded to requests for comment.

Jacobi, who has studied interruptions during Supreme Court arguments, said the longer format may counterintuitively have downsides for transparency.

“It’s become a little less accessible,” she said of the run-on arguments. “I do think there’s a lot less discipline now.”

It’s also not clear that shortening the sessions would impact the outcome of cases. By the time the justices reach an argument, they have read hundreds of pages of briefs and they have often confronted similar legal questions in past cases. Several justices have made clear over the years that they have a sense of how they think the case should turn out before they take their seats.

“Inevitably,” Alito told the 5th Circuit’s judicial conference in May, according to SCOTUSblog, he has “a tentative idea” of how a case will turn out before arguments.

“Sometimes it really makes a difference in terms of ‘help me to try to figure this out,’” Justice Elena Kagan said in a 2010 interview a few months after joining the court. “Sometimes maybe a little bit less so.”

The longer soliloquys can occasionally lead to awkward exchanges for Roberts, who is expected to control the timing of the arguments and occasionally referee who has the floor.

In late March, as the justices were debating a policy of barring asylum seekers from entering the United States, Sotomayor leaned into a Trump administration attorney for nearly three minutes. A former prosecutor, Sotomayor often cuts off advocates if they’re dancing around a direct answer.

“The majority of those people were shipped back or had to go back from where they came and were killed,” Sotomayor said, recalling the US government’s decision in 1939 to bar entry for hundreds of Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany aboard an ocean liner. “That’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it?”

The government attorney, Vivek Suri, attempted to pivot, returning to what he viewed as the “question before the court.”

As Sotomayor began to interrupt, Roberts made clear he had had enough.

“Could I,” the chief began, turning his attention to Suri. “Would you complete your answer?”

It’s not just the length but also the format that has occasionally drawn criticism on the bench.

The ordered questioning has created unusual dynamics. Thomas often gets the first word. Jackson often gets the last word — which she frequently uses as an opportunity to reinforce positions taken by members of the court’s liberal wing earlier in the discussion.

The benefits are less certain for the justices in the middle.

“Well, let me begin with Justice Sotomayor’s rebuttal of what she took me to be asking about regarding constitutional rights,” Alito said during arguments in March in a case about the extent to which criminal defendants may waive their right to appeal when they enter into plea agreements.

Because Sotomayor is less senior, Alito knew she would get the final word in the exchange — a point he was eager to note.

“Now she will have the right to surrebuttal,” Alito said of his colleague. “I won’t have a chance to answer under this questioning regime that we have now.”