Where Have All the En Bancs Gone?

The May oral argument calendar is available on the Tenth Circuit website, and once again there won't be any en banc arguments, nor are there any en banc arguments scheduled during any of the special sessions over the summer.  The Tenth Circuit went through the entire 2007-2008 term without holding a single en banc argument.  Indeed, as far as I can tell the last en banc argument held in the Tenth Circuit was back in November 2006, in the Zamora v. Elite Logistics case.

I've speculated in earlier posts that this paucity of en bancs may be the result of the Tenth Circuit judges losing their appetite for the deeply divided decisions that have resulted from recent en banc rehearings.  Cortez v. McCauley, for example, resulted in four separate opinions covering nearly 75 pages, and the back-and-forth between Judge Kelly's majority opinion and Judge Gorsuch's dissenting opinion seemed far more heated than we're used to seeing in this circuit.