Obama has lowest win rate at the Supreme Court than any president in over 80 years, study reveals

A recent study has revealed that President Barack Obama had lost more legal arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in modern history.

A research paper released earlier this month by Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago has indicated that Obama had the lowest win rate that any president going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Christian Post reported.

The study was based on a dataset of 3,778 orally argued cases between 1932 and 2015, covering 13 presidential administrations.

"Presidents prevailed in nearly two-thirds of their cases; and captured over 60% of all votes cast," the researchers wrote. "Obama's win rate of just 50.5% is significantly lower than the average win rate and, in fact, the lowest in our dataset," they added.

The authors of the study attributed the president's court defeats to a general trend of decline in administrative success rates that began after Ronald Reagan left office.

"Before Reagan, the president prevailed in 65 percent of his cases and captured 61 percent of all votes; during the Reagan years, those percentages increased significantly to 75 percent and 68 percent," the study explained, according to Washington Examiner.

The researchers pointed out that presidents have prevailed less frequently at the Supreme Court since Reagan, and they also noted that Obama's win rate is not significantly lower than George W. Bush.

The study also contended that the quality of lawyers that challenged the government in court has improved, making it more difficult for the president to prevail. It noted that the specialized bar of Supreme Court lawyers that emerged in recent years is "of equal or even higher quality than the president's lawyers."

Some experts have argued that the president's losses in the high court due to his executive overreach.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Obama administration argued 10 cases in 2016 that resulted in unanimous decisions against the government. The losses indicated that the president did not get a vote from the justices that he appointed to the Supreme Court, namely Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Epstein and Posner were not the only ones to take note of Obama's low win rate. In February 2016, the libertarian think tank Cato Institute published an article describing the Obama administration's record in the Supreme Court as "abysmal."

"In the first 6.5 years of Obama's presidency (January 2009 to June 2015), the government lost unanimously at the Supreme Court 23 times, an average of 3.62 cases per year," wrote Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute.