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

This morning the Supreme Court heard oral argument in a pair of cases filed by two teachers in southern California, who sued the Catholic schools where they worked after they learned that their contracts wouldn’t be renewed. The Catholic schools have urged the courts to throw out the teachers’ cases, relying on a doctrine known… Read More

UPDATE: On Friday Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked the release of the grand jury materials and ordered the House Judiciary Committee to respond by Monday, May 18, at 3 p.m. EDT. The committee had not opposed the temporary hold, known as an administrative stay, to give the court time to review the government’s request…. Read More

In 2013, officials with ties to Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, altered the traffic pattern on the George Washington Bridge in an effort to punish the mayor of nearby Fort Lee, New Jersey, for his failure to support Christie’s reelection bid. The change in the traffic pattern led to four days of… Read More

This post is based extensively on data collected by Casey Quinlan, Kalvis Golde and Katie Bart. On many days at the Supreme Court, members of the general public hoping to obtain a coveted spot at oral argument are not the only ones waiting in line on the sidewalk outside the court. Especially on days when… Read More

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