The Washington Post reports that over the Court’s first eight oral arguments, Justice Jackson “dominated the questioning and commentary, speaking twice as much as her next most loquacious colleague.” The WaPo article draws on data compiled by Adam Feldman on his Empirical SCOTUS blog.
In this blog post, Feldman presents a graph of the overall word counts for each justice during these first eight arguments:
Note that the three liberal justices led the way in number of words spoken; their total appears to have been barely exceeded by the six other justices combined.
Feldman also notes that Sackett v. EPA (the very first case argued) was the only case in which Justice Jackson did not lead the justices in words spoken.
Feldman has kindly shared his raw data with me. By my calculations, Jackson accounted for just over 24% of the total words spoken by the nine justices in the October argument session. She topped 30% in more than three arguments (Reed v. Goertz, Arellano v. McDonough, and Helix Energy Solutions v. Hewitt), and in one case (National Pork Producers v. Ross) she managed to get in more words than one of the four advocates (and from 65% to 81% of the words of each of the other three advocates).
My own guess is that Jackson’s eight years as a federal district judge, in which she didn’t share her courtroom with any other jurists, accounts for her voluminous questioning. With the exception of her very long and jumbled speech/question on the 14th Amendment in Merrill v. Milligan, her questioning is not likely to have been perceived or misperceived by her colleagues as grandstanding. That said, I expect that she will attempt to scale things back—but probably not in her very next argument, which is Students For Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina on October 31.