SCOTUSblog

The Supreme Court is between sittings. The justices will meet next for their January 4 conference; John Elwood’s Relist Watch compiles the petitions likely relisted for this conference. The calendar for the January sitting, which will begin on January 7, is available on the Supreme Court’s website.

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A week ago we posted a survey soliciting reader feedback (which can be found here). We received many responses, and we’re grateful to everyone who took the time to answer. We will be considering your responses and suggestions in the days ahead.

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Last month the Supreme Court announced that it would, for the second time, review a case from Virginia challenging the legislative districts drawn in 2011 for the state’s House of Delegates as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering – the idea that legislators relied too much on race when drawing the maps. Today Virginia legislators […]

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This week we highlight petitions pending before the Supreme Court that address, among other things, the applicability of the “commercial activity” exception to sovereign immunity in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to certain suits; whether the establishment clause precludes courts from considering relevant, admissible secular evidence in ordinary trust and property disputes because the litigants […]

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Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court, that the federal government yesterday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to enforce the Trump administration’s ban on service in the military by transgender people while its appeals of adverse decisions in three cases play out in […]

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Last month the Trump administration asked the justices to allow it to bypass the courts of appeals and immediately take up three cases (here, here and here) challenging the government’s ban on service in the military by most transgender individuals. Today the administration was back at the Supreme Court, giving the government a back-up option: If the justices […]

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This term, the Supreme Court will hear argument in its 100th case decided below by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Supreme Court’s recent grant of Kisor v. Wilkie also marks the fourth case granted from the Federal Circuit this term. This is by no means a small fraction of the […]

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Lindsay See is the solicitor general of West Virginia, which led a group of 27 other states and the governor of Kentucky in a cert-stage amicus brief in support of the petitioners in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association. No case is ever a lock for Supreme Court review, but the odds were always […]

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Richard B. Katskee is Legal Director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Symbols have power. They communicate complex ideas, often more effectively and more forcefully than mere words. They are remembered for decades or even centuries. They speak to the heart, not just the head. And what is true for symbols generally […]

The post Symposium: Cross purposes — Why a Christian symbol can’t memorialize all war dead appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

Briefly: At CNBC, Tucker Higgins reports that “Justice Brett Kavanaugh has only been on the bench for two months, but a controversial decision announced this week has abortion opponents starting to worry that he may not be the ally on the high court that they expected.” Lyle Denniston reports at Constitution Daily that “[a] group of […]

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