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

==== 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.”