It is a Herculean accomplishment for an appellate attorney to have a case accepted at the United States Supreme Court. After all, they take only about 75 cases per cycle out of more than 10,000 petitions requesting that they take a case. That’s a 99.3% rejection rate. Most attorneys go through their entire career never asking to have a case accepted at the Supreme Court. A tiny fraction of those applying ever have one accepted.
Thus, lightening struck two times in the first year of the Finney Law Firm when the Supreme Court accepted and reversed two cases from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals for our clients.
As we addressed here, this year the Finney Law Firm had another petition before the U.S. Supreme Court, a First Amendment case addressing yard sign regulation in the City of Garfield Heights, Ohio. That case has virtually identical legal issues to another case before the Supreme Court, Reed v. Town of Gilbert that was heard on oral argument on January 12th of this year. A decision in the Reed case is expected before the end of April. Thus, we wrote in our certiorari petition to the Supreme Court that the Court should dispose of the Garfield Heights case in the same manner as the Reed case.
Friday, that petition was considered in conference by the US Supreme Court. And … all we can say with certainty is they did not deny the petition, as the Court does with 99% of the petitions before it. Rather, it appears to us at present that they agree with our argument that the case mirrors the Reed case, and is holding our petition pending disposition of that case.
If so, it’s not quite like having another oral argument at the Supreme Court as we did just after Easter of last year, but it is still an utterly remarkable accomplishment.
Congratulations to attorney Curt Hartman and our Public Interest law team on this great achievement, three times in two years!
