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

Last summer, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Gill v. Whitford, a partisan-gerrymandering challenge to the state legislative maps drawn by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature, one of the most important cases of the term. The court heard oral argument in the case in October; two months later, it agreed to take on Benisek v. Lamone, a partisan-gerrymandering… Read More

The Supreme Court issued six new rulings in argued cases this week: four on Monday, and two more yesterday. The new opinions mean that 19 cases now remain undecided, but they did not shed a lot of new light on who might be writing those outstanding opinions.

Yesterday the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts released the 2017 financial disclosure reports for the justices of the Supreme Court. The reports are relatively opaque – they indicate the value of investments only in a wide range, for example – and do not include the value of the real estate in which the justices… Read More

The Supreme Court today ruled that a U.S. court does not need to take at face value a foreign government’s word about how that country’s laws operate. Instead, the justices explained, although courts should “carefully consider” what a foreign government says about its own laws, they are not bound by those views; they can also… Read More

When Minnesota voters go to the polls in November, they’ll likely have more wardrobe options than the last time the state held an election. That’s because this morning the Supreme Court ruled that a state law prohibiting voters from wearing clothing or other apparel containing political messages to the polls violates the First Amendment. Minnesota… Read More

This morning the Supreme Court issued orders from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices did not add any new cases to their merits docket for the next term. The justices’ failure to act on Arlene’s Flowers v. Washington, a closely watched case involving issues similar to Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission,… Read More

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