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  3. ›How it works

The Gavel

How The Gavel works

The Gavel archives Supreme Court merits work: docket cases, opinions, oral arguments, and how sitting justices appear across those cases. It is built for reading the Court’s decided and argued work, not every filing on every petition.

Certiorari vs merits

Most petitions never become full Court cases. Certiorari is the Court’s decision to take a case. Merits work is what follows: briefing, argument, and opinion.

This shelf emphasizes argued merits cases discovered across an expanding October Term window, maintained from CourtListener. and related SCOTUS materials. Absence from the docket here does not mean a petition does not exist upstream.

Terms and the docket

The Court works in October Terms. Case cards carry docket numbers, term labels, and status so you can see where a matter sits.

Opinions and argument audio attach when the archive has them. Join lists can be partial when sources only name some joiners.

Justices as a second shelf

Justice pages summarize how a person appears as author, joiner, or panel participant across archived cases. They are not biographies of every vote in American history.

How to read this shelf

Start on the docket for case posture. Open opinions when you need holdings and citations. Use arguments for audio context. Follow outbound SCOTUS and CourtListener links when you need the live publisher view.

Related definitions

  • Certiorari
  • October Term
  • Merits
  • Opinion
  • Oral argument

Explore

DocketJusticesStart hereThe Gavel hub
The Gavel archives SCOTUS merits cases from recent October Terms, not every filing at the Court. Case records come from CourtListener REST API (Free Law Project) + SCOTUS PDFs, with outbound links to official SCOTUS dockets. Built 2026-08-07T20:07:34Z. Limits: methodology.