How SCOTUS Alerts works: sources, labels, and speed
Updated
SCOTUS Alerts is an independent project. We are not affiliated with the Supreme Court. Our job is to tell you, quickly and accurately, that the Court has issued something, and to link you to the Court's own document.
Sources
- supremecourt.gov: we check the Court's opinion pages every minute, around the clock.
- CourtListener, run by the nonprofit Free Law Project: we pull case metadata and archive links from its API.
We do not write summaries or analysis. The one-line holding on some cases is the Reporter of Decisions' summary, labeled as such.
Labels
- 🚨 Merits decisions: opinions on the Court's slip opinion page, the decisions most people mean by "a Supreme Court ruling." Shown without a badge.
- 📜 Statement on cert: a Justice's separate writing about granting or denying review. More.
- ⚡ Emergency application: a ruling on an application or an in-chambers opinion. More.
- ✏️ Revised opinion: a correction to an opinion already issued. Never sent as a new alert.
Speed
Speed is measured from the moment our monitor first sees a writing on supremecourt.gov to the first alert we send for it, on any channel. The latency page publishes the median and 95th percentile over recent decisions, including the slow ones. On mornings with several decisions, email waits until the Court has been quiet for about two minutes so you get one digest instead of a burst.
Privacy of parties
When CourtListener marks a case as blocked to protect a vulnerable party, we treat it as if it does not exist: no case page, no feed entry, no sitemap entry, no alert.
Corrections
If you see a mistake, a mislabeled writing, a wrong name, a broken link, please tell us. We fix errors as fast as we can.