Covering the Supreme Court and the Judiciary in (mostly) Plain English

This morning the Supreme Court ruled that a Minnesota woman should not receive the money from her ex-husband’s life insurance policy even though she was still his beneficiary when he died in 2011, four years after their divorce. The man’s children had argued that they should get the money because a state law passed in… Read More

[NOTE: This post was updated with additional analysis at 12:55 p.m.] The Supreme Court today rejected a challenge to one of the practices used by Ohio to remove voters from the state’s voter rolls. By a vote of 5-4, the justices agreed that the practice under question – which cancels the registration of voters who do… Read More

On Monday the justices issued decisions in four merits cases. Although there is still a fair amount of ambiguity, those rulings (in addition to being important on their own) also help to shed some light on who might (or, equally significantly, might not) be authoring the opinions that have not yet been released.

The justices handed the federal government a partial victory today in Azar v. Garza, in which it had asked them to nullify a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that cleared the way for a pregnant teenager to obtain an abortion. The teenager, known in the litigation as… Read More

[NOTE: This post was updated with additional analysis at 2:17 p.m.] The Supreme Court ruled today in favor of Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to make a custom cake for a same-sex couple because he believed that doing so would violate his religious beliefs. This was one of the most anticipated decisions of… Read More

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars employers from discriminating “because of” sex. On Tuesday, a New York sky-diving company asked the justices to review a ruling by a federal appeals court that the law applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation. The lower courts are divided on this question, which the company describes… Read More

In 1939, Congress enacted the Public Salary Tax Act, which allows state and local governments to tax federal employees as long as the tax does not discriminate against an employee “because of the source of the pay or compensation.” When the Supreme Court returns from its summer recess, one of the cases on its merits… Read More

The Supreme Court issued orders this morning from the justices’ private conference last week, and the big news out of today’s order list was what the justices did not do: They did not add any new cases to their merits docket for next term, and they did not ask the U.S. solicitor general to weigh… Read More

When two Virginia police officers searched for the motorcyclist who had eluded them by driving away at speeds of up to 140 miles per hour, they probably would not have imagined that the case would end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s exactly what happened, and today the justices ruled that the officers… Read More

In 1855, the Yakama Nation entered into a treaty with the federal government in which it gave up 10 million acres of land in Washington state in exchange for rights under the treaty, including the right (provided in Article III of the treaty) of the nation’s members “to travel upon all public highways.” That provision… Read More