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

The Supreme Court on Tuesday night refused to stay the execution of Johnny Johnson, scheduled for 6 p.m. CDT. The court’s liberal justices dissented from the decision to allow the execution to go forward, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor arguing that Johnson was entitled to a hearing to determine whether he is mentally competent to be… Read More

Lawyers for a self-appointed civil rights “tester” have asked the Supreme Court to dismiss her case as moot – that is, no longer a live controversy. Deborah Laufer, who has physical disabilities and vision impairments, told the justices that she has voluntarily dismissed her case in the district court after an attorney who represented her… Read More

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a controversial $6.6 billion natural-gas pipeline spanning just over 300 miles, from West Virginia’s northwestern border to southern Virginia. In a brief unsigned order, the justices lifted orders by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that… Read More

On Friday morning the Supreme Court declined to block the execution of James Barber, who was sentenced to death in 2003 for the brutal murder of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps. Barber died by lethal injection at a prison in southern Alabama a few hours later. Barber’s execution followed a trio of botched lethal injections in 2022,… Read More

Just two weeks after the justices finished releasing their opinions from the 2022-23 term, the court is now looking ahead to next term. The Supreme Court on Friday released the calendar for its October oral argument session. The justices will hear just six cases over five days between Oct. 2 and Oct. 11. The session… Read More

The Supreme Court agreed to decide what protections Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides to employees who contend they were the victim of a discriminatory transfer. The justices announced on Friday that they had granted review in Muldrow v. St. Louis and six other cases, two of which will be argued… Read More

The court handed a major victory to business owners who oppose same-sex marriage for religious reasons on Friday. A six-justice majority agreed that Colorado cannot enforce a state anti-discrimination law against a Christian website designer who does not want to create wedding websites for same-sex couples because doing so would violate her First Amendment right… Read More

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument next fall in a major gun-rights case challenging the constitutionality of a federal ban on the possession of guns by individuals who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders. The Biden administration had asked the justices to weigh in after a federal appeals court struck down the ban… Read More

This post was updated on June 30 at 3:53 p.m. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority last year when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in student loans. The Biden administration had said that as many as 43 million Americans would have… Read More

Federal law bars employers from discriminating against workers for practicing their religion unless the employer can show that the worker’s religious practice cannot “reasonably” be accommodated without “undue hardship.” The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a trivial burden is not the kind of “undue hardship” that will justify an employer’s failure to accommodate an… Read More