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

Less than seven months after a landmark decision striking down a New York law that restricted handguns in public, the Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed the state – at least for now – to keep enforcing the gun-control law that the state enacted in response to that ruling. In a brief unsigned order on the… Read More

The justices declined to block the execution of Robert Fratta, whose lethal injection in Texas was scheduled for Tuesday evening. Fratta was sentenced to die for the 1994 murder-for-hire of his estranged wife, Farah. He was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1997. A federal court threw out that conviction, but in 2009 he… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday revived efforts by a Texas inmate to throw out his conviction and death sentence in a case in which prosecutors agree that he should get a new trial. The ruling in favor of Areli Escobar came on a list of orders released from the justices’ private conference last week. The… Read More

2022 was a turbulent year for the Supreme Court. In May, a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked to the press, revealing that a majority of the court was poised to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Less than two months later, a divided court made that decision official, in Dobbs v…. Read More

The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a federal judge’s ruling that had ordered the government to end a Trump-era border policy that allows immigration officials to quickly turn away migrants seeking asylum. The justices agreed to hear argument in late February or early March on whether 19 states with Republican attorneys general can step in… Read More

Nineteen states came to the Supreme Court on Monday, asking the justices to keep in place a Trump-era policy that allows immigration officials to quickly expel migrants seeking asylum at the U.S. border. The states, led by Arizona, warn the justices that if the court does not block a federal judge’s order that would end… Read More

The Supreme Court will hear back-to-back oral arguments on Feb. 28 in a pair of challenges to the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. The student-loan challenges are the highest-profile cases on the court’s February argument calendar, which was released on Monday morning. The February calendar also includes two cases involving the scope of a federal… Read More

The Supreme Court on Tuesday morning added three new cases to its merits docket for the 2022-23 term. The justices considered all three cases – involving federal securities laws, the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause, and the proper remedy when a defendant is tried in the wrong place – at their private conference last week. Although… Read More

The Supreme Court will resume its pre-pandemic practice of announcing opinions from the bench, the court’s Public Information Office said on Monday afternoon. But although the justices now provide live audio of oral arguments, the opinion announcements will not be livestreamed. Instead, consistent with the court’s pre-pandemic practice, the audio of opinion announcements will not… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a request from a group of tobacco companies and retailers to block a California law that bans the sale of flavored tobacco. The state enacted the law in response to an increase in tobacco use by young people, but a group of tobacco companies argued that a 2009… Read More