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

Just under two months after a divided court allowed an earlier moratorium to remain in place, the Supreme Court on Thursday night blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the latest federal moratorium on evictions, imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The justices divided along ideological lines, with the court’s three liberal justices – Stephen Breyer,… Read More

The Supreme Court on Tuesday night rejected the Biden administration’s plea for a reprieve from a district-court order requiring it to reinstate a Trump-era program known as the “remain in Mexico” policy, which requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while they wait for a hearing in U.S. immigration court. The court was divided on… Read More

The Supreme Court added two new immigration cases to its docket for the 2021-22 term on Monday morning, granting a pair of petitions filed by the federal government. The relatively rare mid-summer additions came as part of the court’s regularly scheduled summer order list, which also included a series of routine orders that (among other… Read More

A group of Alabama real-estate agents and landlords returned to the Supreme Court on Friday, asking the justices to block the Biden administration’s latest ban on evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The request came just under two months after the justices, in a 5-4 vote, declined to lift an earlier iteration of the eviction moratorium…. Read More

The Biden administration on Friday afternoon asked the Supreme Court for an immediate reprieve from having to reinstate a Trump-era program known as the “remain in Mexico” policy, which requires asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border to stay in Mexico while they wait for a hearing in U.S. immigration court. Telling the justices that the… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday released the schedule for the justices’ November argument session, which begins on Nov. 1 and runs through Nov. 10. The justices will hear oral arguments in nine cases over six days, including the argument in one of the highest-profile cases of the term so far, the challenge to a New… Read More

The Supreme Court will not interfere with Indiana University’s vaccine mandate. On Thursday evening, Justice Amy Coney Barrett turned down a request from a group of Indiana University students to block the school’s requirement that students be vaccinated against the virus. Barrett, who is responsible for emergency appeals from Indiana, denied the students’ request without… Read More

A divided Supreme Court on Thursday night granted a request from a group of New York landlords to lift part of a state moratorium on residential evictions put in place at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling in Chrysafis v. Marks came three days after a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., heard… Read More

Nearly seven months after his inauguration, President Joe Biden announced that he has nominated Elizabeth Prelogar to serve as the U.S. solicitor general, the federal government’s top lawyer at the Supreme Court. Prelogar, who has served as the acting solicitor general since January, is widely respected in the legal community, but the Biden administration took… Read More

In the first test of COVID-19 vaccine requirements to arrive at the Supreme Court, a group of Indiana University students asked the justices on Friday afternoon to block the school’s requirement that all students be vaccinated against the virus. Both a federal district court in Indiana and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th… Read More