by Dennis Crouch
For many years, I relied on certpool.com to keep tabs on the Supreme Court’s certiorari docket. When that site went dark, I started building my own tracker in 2024, running it locally on my personal computer and checking it daily for new and interesting cases before the US Supreme Court. That project has now grown into SCOTUSGate.com, which I’m making publicly available for the first time. The site is very much in alpha, a work in progress, but it is functional and I’d welcome feedback from readers as it develops.
SCOTUSGate tracks petitions for certiorari and shadow-docket activity across the full Supreme Court docket. The database (named Cerberus, after the three-headed dog who guards the gates of the underworld) currently shows over 1,000 pending petitions, with structured data on conference scheduling, cert-stage briefing, CVSG invitations, and case dispositions. The site pulls docket information directly from the Court several times per day and I have incorporated both traditional text analysis tools as well as AI to extract questions presented from petition PDFs and assign topic tags for filtering and discovery.
The name works on a few levels. A gate as portal: the site is a point of entry into information about what the Court is considering. A gate as barrier: the certiorari process is itself a gate, with the Court granting review in only a small fraction of cases. And in the Watergate tradition of institutional-accountability naming: a site built on the conviction that the Court’s work should be visible and open to scrutiny, particularly at the cert and shadow-docket stages where transparency is most limited.
The Supreme Court receives roughly 7,000 petitions for certiorari each year but grants review in fewer than 80 cases, a rate of just over 1%. The certiorari pipeline is where most Supreme Court litigation begins and ends, yet it receives far less systematic public attention than the merits docket. Cases at this stage may be conferenced, relisted, held for related cases, or subjected to a "call for the views of the Solicitor General" (CVSG) before any grant or denial issues.
One feature I find particularly useful is the IP Cases filter, which collects patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret petitions in one place. That page is what I use to identify cases for Patently-O coverage. I currently have a porous filter because I don’t want to miss any of the cases – but that means that the list has some false positives. An Amicus Watch page tracks cert-stage amicus filings, which are often early signals of cases the Court may find worth taking.
Existing resources like SCOTUSblog, Oyez, and the Court’s own website each serve different purposes. SCOTUSblog provides excellent news coverage and commentary on granted and the “hottest” cases. Oyez offers oral argument audio and case summaries. The Court’s official docket is the authoritative source but is difficult to search and lacks any subject-matter classification. SCOTUSGate is designed to fill a gap in structured, searchable, and filterable tracking of the cert-stage pipeline across the full docket. Like I said, I built it for my own purposes, but decided to go ahead and release it to the public.
I am actively developing the site and would appreciate bug reports, feature suggestions, and feedback on data accuracy. You can reach me at dcrouch@gmail.com.