U.S. Supreme Court lawyers for decades have known of the importance of highlighting “circuit splits” when seeking the justices’ review in a case, but a Stanford Law School professor says there’s a better way to highlight disagreement among lower courts than simple “nose counting.”

In a new paper, Joseph A. Grundfest has debuted a more sophisticated methodology for quantifying the scale of disagreement among lower courts that he says could prove useful for lawyers petitioning for Supreme Court review—and could even come in handy for those opposing such review.