When we last checked in on the Ohio Supreme Court’s discretionary docket, the March 17 announcement had just delivered a sobering 4% acceptance day and the 2026 Year-to-Date (YTD) figures stood at 205 total decisions. Nearly three months and eleven announcement dates later, the sample has more than doubled. With the June 9 release now in the books, we have 443 jurisdictional decisions to work with—enough to move past week-to-week noise and identify the genuine structural patterns of the court’s first half.
Below, we refresh the practice-area analysis, revisit the “shadow vote,” update the Jurisdictional Speed Index (JSI) and flag the single most important reversal in the YTD story: the civil-versus-criminal acceptance gap has not just narrowed—it has flipped.
Link to The 2026 mid-year snapshot (total decisions: 443) The 2026 mid-year snapshot (total decisions: 443)
The headline number has barely moved, which is itself the story. Across 443 decisions, the court accepted 29, for an overall acceptance rate of 6.55%. Back in late March, the YTD rate sat at 6.34%. The intervening months of data have confirmed that the court’s true discretionary appetite lives in the mid-six-percent range and that the February surge driven by held cases was the aberration, not the baseline.
| Metric | March 17 YTD (prior post) | 2026 Mid-Year YTD |
| Total Decisions | 205 | 443 |
| Overall Acceptance Rate | 6.34% | 6.55% |
| Criminal Acceptance Rate | 7.02% | 6.15% |
| Civil Acceptance Rate | 4.49% | 7.04% |
Link to The reversal: civil appeals are now outpacing criminal
The reversal: civil appeals are now outpacing criminal
In March, we reported that the pure civil appeal was the hardest climb in the building—a 4.5% YTD acceptance rate against 7.0% for criminal matters, many of which were riding the coattails of lead-case holds. That gap has not merely closed. It has inverted.
- Civil appeals (7.04% acceptance): Out of 199 civil decisions, 14 were accepted.
- Criminal appeals (6.15% acceptance): Out of 244 criminal decisions, 15 were accepted.
The driver is straightforward: the post-March docket has been markedly friendlier to civil litigants. In the window since March 17, the court accepted 9 civil cases against 108 decisions (8.3%) while taking only 7 criminal cases out of 128 (5.5%). The spring grants reflect this civil tilt across a wide subject-matter spread—insurance (Grange Indemn. Ins. Co. v. Harden, No. 2025-1695), public-entity and municipal disputes (Yoby v. Cleveland, No. 2026-0198), the Attorney General’s regulatory enforcement docket (State ex rel. Yost v. Elevate Smoke, L.L.C., No. 2026-0125) and banking (Osborne v. Parkview Fed. Sav. Bank, No. 2026-0282).
Practice takeaway: The March 17 post framed the 11% civil snapshot as “a rare bright spot.” The mid-year data suggests it was an early signal. For civil practitioners, the discretionary door has been measurably more open this spring than the winter numbers implied.
Link to The “Rule of Five” hardens The “Rule of Five” hardens
In March we observed that, despite the constitutional “Rule of Four,” the court was in practice moving in blocks of five or six to grant jurisdiction. The mid-year data turns that observation into a near-rule. Of the 16 cases accepted since March 17, the dominant vote split was decisively 5-2, appearing in ten of those grants. Unanimous 7-0 grants remain reserved largely for the Attorney General’s enforcement actions and select matters (State v. Matosky, No. 2026-0084; Elevate Smoke, No. 2026-0125; In re A.G., No. 2026-0213), while the bare 4-3 grant remains genuinely rare—only five across the entire YTD, the most recent being State v. Thompson (No. 2026-0294) on June 3.
The practical lesson holds and strengthens: counting to four is the constitutional floor but persuading a fifth justice is the realistic target.
Link to The “shadow vote:” who is listening (YTD) The “shadow vote:” who is listening (YTD)
The lone-and-grouped dissents from jurisdictional denials remain our best proxy for which justices are receptive to a given argument. Across the full YTD, 107 of 414 rejections (25.8%) drew at least one noted dissent and the leaderboard has sharpened considerably since March.
| Justice | Dissents from Denial (YTD) |
| Brunner | 47 |
| Fischer | 41 |
| Kennedy | 25 |
| Hawkins | 16 |
| DeWine | 7 |
| Shanahan | 7 |
| Deters | 4 |
Justices Brunner and Fischer have separated from the field as the court’s most persistent “let’s-take-it” votes, together accounting for the lion’s share of recorded dissents. The notable mid-year mover is Justice Hawkins, whose dissents from denial have accumulated steadily through the spring grants and who now appears regularly in the fragmented 5-2 splits (e.g., St. Leonard v. Agengo, No. 2026-0059; State v. Dejournett, No. 2026-0456; State v. Ngaide, No. 2026-0358). For an advocate calibrating a memorandum in support of jurisdiction, the Brunner-Fischer axis remains the most reliable audience, with Kennedy and Hawkins increasingly worth writing toward.
Link to The Jurisdictional Speed Index (JSI): a consistent clock The Jurisdictional Speed Index (JSI): a consistent clock
A word on methodology, because a careful reader will rightly ask what we are measuring from. For this refresh we anchor the JSI to a single, uniform starting point: the date the appellant’s memorandum in support of jurisdiction is filed, which is the one milestone present in nearly every case. Measured this way—from the opening of the jurisdictional phase to the court’s entry—the figures are directly comparable across the entire docket:
- Avg. days to decision, all cases YTD: 74.4 days
- Avg. days to a grant: 71.4 days
- Avg. days to a denial: 74.6 days
Grants and denials now clear on a broadly similar timeline and the overall wait runs closer to two and a half months from the support filing than the six-to-eight weeks a narrower clock would suggest. (Our earlier posts measured a shorter interval because they clocked from the appellee’s response date; anchoring instead to the support filing captures the full pendency and avoids mixing cases that did and did not draw a response.)
Link to The waiver advantage—measured correctly—is real The waiver advantage—measured correctly—is real
Here we correct the record from our March analysis. Measured from each appellee’s own filing date, waivers and oppositions appear to reach a denial at an identical pace (roughly 48 days apiece) and we previously described the two as a statistical tie. That parity is an artifact of the anchor: a Waiver of Memorandum in Response is due within 20 days, while a full opposition has 30 days, so the waiver enjoys a built-in head start that measuring “from each side’s filing” silently erases.
Put both strategies on the same clock—days from the appellant’s memorandum in support—and the advantage reappears and it is substantial:
| Appellee Strategy | Avg. Days to Denial (from support filing) | Filing Deadline |
| Waiver of Memorandum in Response | 59.2 days | 20 days |
| Full Memorandum in Opposition | 76.1 days | 30 days |
For an appellee confident the appeal lacks a jurisdictional hook—no certified conflict, no substantial constitutional question, no genuine matter of public or great general interest—the waiver is not merely cost-effective; it is meaningfully faster to the same outcome, shaving roughly two-plus weeks off the wait. The full opposition continues to earn its keep only where there is a real risk a justice could be persuaded to bite.
Link to The bottom line for practitioners The bottom line for practitioners
The first half of 2026 resolves into a few durable lessons:
- The real acceptance rate is ~6.5%. The February spike was holds, not a thaw. Plan accordingly.
- Civil is no longer the harder climb. The winter framing has flipped; spring grants ran civil-heavy and the YTD civil rate (7.04%) now edges criminal (6.15%).
- Target the fifth vote. The 5-2 grant is the modal outcome. The “Rule of Four” is the floor; the “Rule of Five” is the reality.
- Budget for the wait. Measured consistently from the support filing, the full jurisdictional phase averages about 74 days.
- The waiver is faster. On an apples-to-apples clock, a waiver reaches denial roughly two weeks sooner than a full opposition—at lower cost and on a shorter deadline.
We will continue tracking every yes and every no. The next refresh will fold in the court’s late-June and summer announcements as the 2026 picture rounds toward its three-quarter mark.
The figures in this post are derived from the author’s tracking of every jurisdictional entry on the court’s announcement dates from Jan. 6 through June 11, 2026. Practice-area classification treats captioned State v. matters as criminal; civil encompasses all remaining decisions, including original actions and agency appeals. All timing figures are measured from the date the memorandum in support of jurisdiction was filed to the date of the court’s entry.