Editing Openai/69668f73-ea68-800d-ac56-44a64b19dae4 (section)

=== Assistant: Short answer: no — not directly, not officially, and not in real time. ===
Short answer: no — not directly, not officially, and not in real time.
But there are some indirect inferences you can sometimes make, and some things that are flatly unknowable.

Let’s separate what is formally knowable, informally inferable, and basically opaque.

==== ### ====

When the Court issues a “Call for the Views of the Solicitor General” (CVSG):
* There is no public vote count
* No justice is listed as requesting it
* No dissents are noted
* No order is published saying “X voted yes, Y voted no”

It simply appears on the docket as: “The Solicitor General is invited to file a brief…”

That’s it.

So there is no record you can FOIA, no PACER equivalent, no archive that later discloses the vote.

===== Even if the Court later grants or denies cert, or later decides the case, the opinion almost never says: =====

: 

So there is no retrospective trail either.

==== You can sometimes make weak, probabilistic inferences from patterns: ====

===== Empirically and anecdotally: =====
* CVSGs are most often pushed by justices who: - Are institutionally cautious - Care about federal regulatory coherence - Care about administrative or market consequences
* That often means: Kagan, sometimes Roberts, sometimes Kavanaugh or Barrett depending on the subject.

Kagan in particular is known (from clerk memoirs and academic accounts) to be very comfortable using the SG as an institutional “fact finder” and “policy coherence check.”

But that does not mean she pushed this one.

===== The Court is more likely to CVSG when: =====
* The case touches federal regulatory schemes (FDA, FTC, EPA, SEC, etc.)
* There are broad national consequences
* The government has an institutional interest but is not a party

Hikma v. Amarin touches:
* FDA labeling
* Hatch–Waxman
* Generic drug regulation
* Competition policy

That makes a CVSG very natural — and not particularly diagnostic of any justice’s ideological lean.

===== Very rarely: =====
* A justice will write separately in the eventual merits decision referencing the SG’s views approvingly or skeptically.
* Or in oral argument they will say “we asked the SG…”

But even then, they don’t say “I was the one who asked.”

==== These things you cannot know: ====
* Whether the CVSG was unanimous or split
* Whether it was 9–0 or 5–4 or 6–3
* Whether it was driven by one justice or several
* Whether it was driven by ideological concern or practical uncertainty
* Whether any justice opposed it strongly

All of that is internal conference material and never disclosed.

==== A CVSG is not a strong signal that the Court is leaning toward grant or denial. ====

It signals:

: 

Nothing more.

Sometimes CVSGs precede grants.
Sometimes they precede denials.
Sometimes they precede GVRs.
Sometimes they precede nothing.

It is a pause for information, not a directional vote.

==== : ====

No.

There is:
* No record
* No disclosure
* No later unsealing
* No reliable reporting
* No insider leaks you can access

You can only do narrative tea-leaf reading — and even that is extremely low-confidence.

==== If you’re trying to model Hikma v. Amarin (which I know you are): ====

Treat the CVSG as:
* A signal that the Court views the case as non-frivolous and systemically relevant,
* But not as a signal of which side is winning internally,
* And not as a signal of ideological alignment.

In other words: it tells you about the Court’s interest, not its preferences.

That’s as far as the evidence can take you.

Anything more precise would be speculation dressed up as insight — and you’re too careful a thinker to accept that.