2026-05-24T11:00:07.890Z / 美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）
- 最高法院大法官们公开抱怨，口头辩论变得过于冗长，且充斥着长篇大论的演说。
- 在保守派占多数的法庭上，自由派大法官索尼娅·索托马约尔和凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊在辩论中的发言最为频繁。
- 疫情期间混合了提问方式的妥协方案，使得监督辩护律师和大法官的发言时长变得更加困难。
AI生成的摘要经CNN编辑审核。
正如所有优秀律师一样，美国最高法院大法官们可以为任何事情争论不休——事实证明，就连如何最佳地进行辩论也能引发争论。
多年来，人们对最高法院口头辩论程序的私下抱怨，在一些大法官的一系列公开露面中越来越多地浮出水面。
“时间太长了，”首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨最近在宾夕法尼亚州的一场法官和律师会议上抱怨道，并承诺将在今夏“对此展开调查”。
据SCOTUSblog报道，大法官塞缪尔·阿利托几天后在得克萨斯州也附和道：“太多长篇大论了”，并补充称他觉得“真正的问题提得太少”。
最高法院的口头辩论通常在每年10月开启新开庭期，持续至次年4月。法律专家一直认为，口头辩论对于裁定具体案件的结果仅具有边际意义。但这些庭审仍能让大法官们检验彼此的理论，正因如此，辩论可能会影响最终判决的影响范围。
而对于公众来说，自疫情以来才首次实现直播的辩论，让人们得以一窥华盛顿九位最有权势的人物如何思考那些往往具有全国影响的各类上诉案件。
“这对法院的合法性至关重要，”埃默里大学法学教授汤娅·雅科比对此说道，她曾对口头辩论进行过深入研究。“这有助于让民众相信，至少这其中有一部分是基于法律的。”
如果缩短庭审时长，其影响可能会最大程度地落在法院的自由派阵营身上——仅因为在最近几个开庭期，这三位大法官的平均发言时长往往是最长的。
疫情期间，法院转向虚拟辩论时，大法官们会按资历顺序提问，而非沿用了数十年的自由式“热烈庭审”模式。2021年大法官们回到实体法庭后，一部分人希望保留按资历排序的提问方式，另一部分人则呼吁恢复节奏更快的疫情前制度。
双方最终达成了一项一直沿用至今的折中方案：先进行自由式提问，随后展开一轮“依次”提问。但这种模式使得监督辩护律师和大法官的发言时长变得更加困难。
最高法院大多数案件的辩论时长安排为60分钟。但近年来，大法官们往往会超出这一时间表，这与前首席大法官威廉·伦奎斯特时代截然不同——当时伦奎斯特对时长把控极为严格，有时甚至会在辩护律师发言中途打断他们。
根据CNN的一项分析，本开庭期口头辩论的平均时长略低于90分钟，较2020年开庭期（当时法院因疫情进行远程辩论）延长了近10分钟。
本开庭期最长的一场辩论时长接近三小时，涉及前总统唐纳德·特朗普实施的全面全球关税政策，最高法院最终裁定该政策无效。
这场 technically 涉及两项上诉的辩论原定时长为80分钟。
对当前方式的批评并非普遍存在。许多最高法院辩护律师——他们可通过发言席上的白色和红色灯光了解计时情况——表示，他们感谢额外的时长，也感谢在“依次”提问环节能够不受打断地与大法官进行一对一交流。
多年来以在口头辩论中从不发言而闻名的大法官克拉伦斯·托马斯也没有反对意见。
“当前的庭审方式可能确实有点冗长，但你不能说你没有机会表达自己的观点，”这位最高法院资深大法官最近在迈阿密外的一场法官和律师集会上说道。
“我不打高尔夫，不打牌，也不出去玩，所以我可以一整天都坐在那里，”托马斯在5月14日由美国第十一巡回上诉法院组织的会议上开玩笑道，“我没地方可去。”
由三位大法官组成的自由派阵营，在保守派拥有六名大法官绝对多数的法院中，往往逆势而为，而且事实证明，他们的发言比同事们更多。
大法官索尼娅·索托马约尔和凯坦吉·布朗·杰克逊尤其健谈。根据经验主义SCOTUS网站创始人亚当·费尔德曼和佛罗里达大学政治学教授杰克·特拉斯科特的分析，作为自由派资深大法官的索托马约尔，在本开庭期的辩论中平均发言时长超过六分钟。
杰克逊作为资历最浅的大法官，在每场辩论中拥有最后发言权，其平均每场发言时长超过八分钟。
相比之下，他们的同事没有一位平均发言时长超过五分钟。
索托马约尔和杰克逊均未回应置评请求。
曾研究过最高法院口头辩论中打断情况的雅科比表示，更长的庭审时长可能会出乎意料地对透明度产生不利影响。
“它变得不那么容易理解了，”她在谈及冗长的辩论时说道，“我确实认为现在的纪律性差了很多。”
目前也不清楚缩短庭审时长是否会影响案件的判决结果。在进行口头辩论之前，大法官们已经阅读了数百页的案情摘要，而且往往在过往案件中遇到过类似的法律问题。多年来，多位大法官明确表示，他们在就座辩论前就已经对案件的判决方向有了自己的看法。
“不可避免地，”阿利托在5月对第五巡回上诉法院的司法会议说道，据SCOTUSblog报道，他在辩论前就对案件的走向“有了初步的想法”。
“有时候这真的会起到‘帮我搞清楚这个问题’的作用，”大法官埃琳娜·卡根在2010年加入法院几个月后的一次采访中说道，“有时候可能作用就没那么大了。”
更长的长篇发言有时会给罗伯茨带来尴尬的局面——人们期望他能掌控辩论的时长，偶尔还需维持发言秩序。
3月下旬，在大法官们就一项禁止寻求庇护者进入美国的政策展开辩论时，索托马约尔针对特朗普政府的一名律师发言了近三分钟。作为前检察官，索托马约尔经常会打断那些回避直接回答的辩护律师。
“那些人中的大多数被遣返，或者不得不从哪里来就回到哪里去，然后被杀害，”索托马约尔回忆起1939年美国政府阻止数百名乘坐远洋客轮逃离纳粹德国的犹太难民入境的决定时说道，“我们现在不就是在这么做吗？”
政府律师维韦克·苏里试图转移话题，回到他认为“法院面前的问题”上。
就在索托马约尔开始打断他时，罗伯茨明确表示他已经受够了。
“我能不能，”这位首席大法官转向苏里说道，“你能不能先完成你的回答？”
引发批评的不仅是时长，还有偶尔在法庭上遭到诟病的庭审形式。
有序的提问方式催生了不同寻常的互动模式。托马斯通常会第一个发言，而杰克逊则通常拥有最后发言权——她经常利用这个机会重申法院自由派成员在讨论前期提出的立场。
对于中间派的大法官来说，这种模式的好处就不那么确定了。
“嗯，让我先谈谈索托马约尔大法官对我所提出的关于宪法权利问题的反驳，”阿利托在3月一场关于刑事被告在达成认罪协议时可在多大程度上放弃上诉权的案件辩论中说道。
由于索托马约尔资历较浅，阿利托知道她将在这场交流中拥有最后发言权——这一点他急于指出。
“现在她将有权进行反驳答辩，”阿利托谈及他的同事时说道，“在我们现在实行的这种提问制度下，我将没有机会回应。”
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.”