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

The Supreme Court heard oral argument this morning in the latest chapter of the battle over the Affordable Care Act’s “birth-control mandate,” which generally requires employers to provide their female employees with health insurance that includes access to certain forms of contraceptives. In 2017, the Trump administration issued new rules that expanded an exemption from… Read More

The Supreme Court announced tonight that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was treated this afternoon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for a benign gallbladder condition. The 87-year-old justice underwent outpatient tests at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington after Monday’s oral argument, the court’s Public Information Office reported, “that confirmed she was suffering from a gallstone… Read More

Voters in the United States do not directly elect the president and the vice president. Instead, the Constitution instructs the states to appoint “electors,” who vote for the president and vice president. In Washington and Colorado, along with almost all other states, the electors are appointed from the same political party as the ticket that… Read More

In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled, by a vote of 6-2, that a provision in a federal law that requires organizations receiving funds to combat HIV/AIDS to “have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking” violates the First Amendment when applied to nongovernmental organizations based in the United States. This morning the justices heard… Read More

This post is based extensively on data collected by Casey Quinlan, Kalvis Golde and Katie Bart. It’s one of the questions we get most often at SCOTUSblog, and it’s one of the hardest to answer: When should I get in line for a seat in the courtroom? Trying to predict when someone needs to arrive… Read More

Shortly before joining a telephone conference call for a historic live-streamed oral argument this morning, the Supreme Court issued orders from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices did not act on some of the high-profile petitions for review that they considered on Friday, including the federal government’s challenge to provisions of California’s “sanctuary… Read More

Last year the UK Supreme Court heard three days of argument on whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson acted properly when he asked Queen Elizabeth II to suspend the country’s parliament in the run-up to the deadline for Britain’s exit from the European Union. When the country’s highest court ruled that the government had shut down… Read More

Eight years ago, in a case called Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, the Supreme Court recognized a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, reflecting the idea that religious institutions normally have the sole right to determine who can act as their ministers. The justices ruled in that case that the exception barred a lawsuit… Read More

In some ways, next week’s consolidated oral argument in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania and Trump v. Pennsylvania will be like 2016 all over again. In the middle of a presidential election season, the justices will once again weigh in on the battle over the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate, which… Read More

On March 4, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in June Medical Services v. Russo, a challenge to a Louisiana law that requires doctors who perform abortions to have the right to admit patients at nearby hospitals. That morning, the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, Bridget Mary McCormack, took to Twitter to playfully… Read More