2Q DAVID-GOLIATH INDEX

(Posted July 5, 2023) The second quarter is in the books, so it’s time to check on how our big guys and little guys are doing at Ninth and Franklin. I count four victories for our Davids and seven for our Goliaths in published and unpublished rulings from the Supreme Court of Virginia. That gives us a quarterly D-GI of 36/64 and an aggregate for the year of 38/62 (six wins for David and ten for Goliath).

If you’ve followed the D-GI in the past few years, you’ll note that David is doing quite well in comparison with his recent dismal showings. I encourage you not to rush to judgment; the court’s output this year has been tiny, so it’s difficult to call 16 decisions in half a year a statistically meaningful sample size.

As I reported here recently, the rest of the year promises very few merits decisions. I expect roughly 15 opinions and unpubs, at most – and maybe closer to nine or ten – between now and the end of December, and some of those won’t feature a David/Goliath dynamic. This will probably be the smallest set of merits decisions in all the years for which I have records. And that goes back to the early 1950s.