Joe Biden · Deep dive

The Legal Record

4matters, all official capacity

Three brought by his own side. One is about a predecessor’s conduct.

Every matter, by posture, never aggregated — the same question asked of every subject at this tier, from the same court, under the same rules. Here it returns four matters, all naming the office rather than the person, and three of them brought by his own side. The previous record at this tier returned nothing at all from the identical method, and this page can show why: the same policy reached the Court under both captions in the same week.

Six of six — the base set is complete

Every subject at this tier is asked the same six questions, fixed before the subject is chosen so the set cannot be picked to suit an argument. The others written for this record are Private Money, The Output, Reach, Affiliations and Standing. With this one the base set is complete, so the overlay dives — the ones specific to what this subject has been — are unblocked. None of them could have been started before now.

The same question is answered for Donald Trump and Barack Obama. The three lists run to fifteen, zero and four, and the tab explaining why that is not a comparison sits on all three pages.

Back to the full record.

Supreme Court matters naming him

Where the Court entered a judgment or ruled on an application

brought by his own side

Which is why no disposition here is scored

policies captioned both ways at once

Same week, two dockets: the President, and the agency

matter about a predecessor’s conduct

His name appears by automatic substitution of the office

matters in his personal capacity

Every caption here names the office, not the person

Scope

The same method, applied a third time unchanged

Matters in which he is a named party on the Supreme Court’s docket, where the Court issued a judgment or ruled on an application.

The rule that decides what is listed

The Court’s caption decides which list a matter belongs on. Where it names him alone, the matter is his. Where it names him as President of the United States, the matter belongs to the office and would have arrived whoever held it. Routine petitions naming the sitting President as a nominal respondent are excluded, as on the other two records at this tier.

The personal-capacity list is empty

There are no matters in the personal-capacity list. Every one of the four below names the office. That is stated rather than left as an empty heading, because an absent list and an empty list read differently.

The docket search returns 75 items for the name. The great majority are filings brought by other people naming the sitting President as a nominal respondent, and the method excludes them — the same rule, written for the first record at this tier, that emptied the list on the second.

Reading it

This method has now been run on three presidencies without alteration. It returned fifteen matters on one record, none at all on another, and four here. The rule did not move between them, which is what makes the difference between the three lists worth explaining rather than reporting.

Read 2026-08-10. A docket search is a live query and this page will need rechecking; any change will be dated rather than edited away. This dive belongs to the record it sits inside. The courts as a subject in their own right are owned by The Federal Courts.