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

This article was updated on June 13 at 2:20 p.m. The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a lawsuit seeking to roll back access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that the doctors and medical groups challenging the expansion of access to the… Read More

The justices will return to the bench on Thursday and Friday of this week to issue opinions in argued cases. Depending on exactly how you count them (for example, will the court eventually issue one or two opinions in the challenges to social media laws in Texas and Florida?), the court has somewhere around 28… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday added two cases to its argument schedule for the 2024-25 term. In a list of orders from their private conference last week, the justices agreed to weigh in on a case involving the calculation of Medicare payments as well as a securities-fraud case against social media giant Meta. The justices… Read More

Justice Clarence Thomas revealed on Friday that conservative billionaire Harlan Crow paid for two trips in 2019, involving a hotel stay in Bali, Indonesia, and at a private club in Sonoma County, Calif. The news came as part of the justices’ annual financial disclosures, which are filed in mid-May and released in early June each… Read More

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the federal government must provide additional funding to cover some administrative costs incurred by Native American tribes that operate their own health-care programs. By a vote of 5-4, with Justice Neil Gorsuch – perhaps the strongest ally of Native Americans on the court – providing the deciding vote,… Read More

In a list of orders released on Monday morning, the Supreme Court added one new case to its argument docket for the 2024-25 term. With roughly one month remaining before the justices’ summer recess, during which they traditionally do not grant new petitions for review, the justices now have only 10 cases on their schedule… Read More

By a vote of 6-3 along ideological lines, the justices ruled that a federal appeals court was wrong when it ordered post-conviction relief for Danny Lee Jones, who contended that his Sixth Amendment right to have adequate representation by his lawyer was violated during the sentencing phase of his trial. Jones was convicted and sentenced… Read More

The Supreme Court on Thursday reinstated a lawsuit by the National Rifle Association, alleging that a New York official violated the group’s First Amendment rights when she urged banks and insurance companies not to do business with it in the wake of the 2018 shooting at a Florida high school. In a unanimous decision by… Read More

The Supreme Court will issue opinions in argued cases on Thursday morning. (I’ll be live-blogging the release of opinions over at SCOTUSblog.) The justices still have approximately 34 decisions left to release before they begin their summer recess at the end of June or beginning of July. Here, in brief, are summaries of the as-yet-undecided… Read More

Two weeks after the New York Times first reported that an upside-down American flag – popular among the “Stop the Steal” movement – flew outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel Alito in the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol, Alito rebuffed requests from Democratic lawmakers to recuse himself from… Read More