As you’ll see below in the Morning Reads section, it was a busy weekend on the Supreme Court beat – to put it lightly. And we’ve got a busy week ahead, as today marks the start of the April argument session. We’re also just two days away from launching our redesigned website.
At the Court
On Friday, the court released its unanimous opinion in Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, holding that oil and gas companies can move a lawsuit seeking to hold them liable for damage to the Louisiana coast back to the federal courts. For more on the decision, see the On Site section below.
After that opinion announcement, the justices met to discuss cases and vote on petitions for review. Orders from that conference are expected this morning at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
Later on Friday, the court indicated that it may announce opinions on Wednesday at 10 a.m. EDT. We will be live blogging that morning beginning at 9:30 a.m.
As noted above, today is the start of the April sitting. The justices will hear argument this morning in two cases: Sripetch v. SEC, on whether the Securities and Exchange Commission can use disgorgement to force a wrongdoer to turn over its profits to the government without showing directly that the wrongdoer’s activities harmed its customers; and T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp., on whether the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, which limits lower federal courts’ authority to review state-court judgments, applies when such judgments remain subject to further review in state courts.
Tomorrow, the justices will hear argument in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, Inc., on whether the FCC violates the Seventh Amendment’s guarantee of a right to a jury trial when it imposes fines for violations of federal communications laws.
And on Wednesday, the justices will hear argument in Blanche v. Lau, on the rights of lawful permanent residents who have been accused of committing a crime that puts them at risk of being removed from the country.
Morning Reads
The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court
Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, The New York Times
The New York Times obtained memos exchanged between the justices over five days in the winter of 2016, when the court was addressing “President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy.” The memos reveal the justices’ debate and how they came to their ultimate (and previously unexplained) decision to halt Obama’s program by a 5-4 vote, “act[ing] before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness.” “‘I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,’” the chief justice wrote when “warned … that he was proposing an unprecedented move.” “But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was ‘the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,’ and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.”
The night the justices released their decision, according to the Times, “marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court’s modern ‘shadow docket,’ the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power.” And the papers obtained by the Times “expose what critics have called the weakness at the heart of the shadow docket: an absence of the kind of rigorous debate that the justices devote to their normal cases.”
The Times published the papers in full, as well as a breakdown of key parts.
Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas not planning to retire this year, sources say
Jan Crawford, CBS News
CBS News reported Friday night that neither Justice Samuel Alito nor Justice Clarence Thomas will retire this year, citing sources close to the two men. “That indicates that this year, with the midterm elections on the horizon, President Trump will not be able to plan on an opportunity to make his fourth nomination to the Supreme Court. … Trump was able to fill three seats on the court during his first term, nominating Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.”
Kagan screamed so loudly at liberal ally after Dobbs leak the ‘wall was shaking,' book claims
Ashley Oliver, Fox News
A forthcoming book on Justice Samuel Alito, set for release on Tuesday, claims that “Justice Elena Kagan’s frustrations boiled over in the aftermath of the Dobbs opinion leak in 2022, leading her to allegedly scream ‘so loudly’ at Justice Stephen Breyer that the ‘wall was shaking,’” according to Fox News. “The Supreme Court’s deep division on abortion was clear at the time, but the book reveals that a typically unified liberal bloc was also fractured” over how to respond to Alito’s request “to speed up writing their dissent because of security threats.” Author Mollie Hemingway wrote that the screaming incident happened when Kagan was trying to convince “Breyer not to accommodate the majority” by quickly finalizing the dissent.
This tariff-refund portal is about to be America's hottest website
Alina Selyukh, NPR
On Monday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection will launch the first phase of its tariff refund process, a process that became necessary when the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs. “U.S. Customs has estimated that it owes a total of $166 billion in tariff refunds, and the agency’s legal filings suggest that the initial phase would tackle the majority of affected imports. On Tuesday, a Customs official told a judge that the vast majority of eligible importers signed up for electronic payments, as the agency is requiring, and that group is owed about $127 billion,” according to NPR.
Transgender athlete focuses on what may be her last track season as Supreme Court ruling looms
John Raby, Associated Press
As the Supreme Court prepares its ruling in two cases on state laws barring transgender athletes from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams, one of the challengers in the cases, Becky Pepper-Jackson, “the only trans person who has sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia,” spoke with the Associated Press about her high school track season and what it’s like waiting for the justices’ decision. “I can’t make their decisions for them, so I just have to wait and see what they’ll say,” Pepper-Jackson said. “I try not to look at it [as] if this could be my last season.” The AP noted that “Pepper-Jackson has won both the discus and shot put in her first two meets” this season.
On Site
Court unanimously sides with oil and gas companies in suit over damage to Louisiana coast
The Supreme Court on Friday sent a lawsuit seeking to hold oil and gas companies liable for damage to the Louisiana coast back to the federal courts by a vote of 8-0, with Justice Samuel Alito not participating because he owns stock in the parent company of one of the defendants in the case.
Court to consider rights of lawful permanent residents accused of committing a crime
During oral argument on Wednesday in Blanche v. Lau, the justices will consider the rights of lawful permanent residents who have been accused of committing a crime that puts them at risk of being removed from the country.
The Brazilian Federal Supreme Court
For SCOTUSblog’s series on different supreme courts around the world, Zachary Shemtob spoke with Professor Diego Werneck Arguelhes, dean of the law faculty at the Insper Institute for Education and Research, about the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court.
Justice Thomas at UT Austin
Last week, Justice Clarence Thomas gave an address at the University of Texas at Austin to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and in doing so remarked on the role of the court, government, and courage – or the lack thereof – to live out what he sees as the founders’ ideals.
The longest-serving justice on the court was welcomed by a standing ovation from students, conservative lawmakers, judges (including UT Law alumna Judge Edith Jones), and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. Meanwhile, some UT students protested outside the venue, holding signs like “Stop the cuts” (a reference to UT’s consolidation of certain departments and programs) and “Clarence Thomas out of UT!”
The appearance was also notable for being in person. In late February, Thomas appeared virtually at a legal conference after security concerns prompted a last-minute switch from an in-person appearance.
Thomas led with his Georgia childhood, describing how “articles of faith,” such as the principles of the Declaration of Independence, were not merely matters of academic debate to the Black community he grew up in. “They were the holy grail, the north star, the rock, immovable and unquestioned.” Even under Jim Crow, he said, the adults around him – including his grandfather, who had no formal education – understood that equality came from God, not from governments who could then withdraw it. “Others with power and animus could treat us as unequal,” he said, “but they lacked the divine power to make us so.”
Thomas then turned to progressivism, which he described as a threat to those principles. President Woodrow Wilson, Thomas said, drew on the model of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany and dismissed natural rights as “a lot of nonsense.” “[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” Thomas added. “It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.” From this premise, Thomas spoke on Plessy v. Ferguson and Buck v. Bell and their connections to eugenics. Thomas remarked that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration are based.”
Perhaps of greatest interest to court watchers, however, were Thomas’ remarks on collegiality among the justices. Responding to a student question following his speech about the “warmth and friendship among Supreme Court justices,” Thomas conceded that things have changed. “Oh, I don’t know … when I said a lot of that, it was when I first went to the court, and that was a different court. That was the World War II generation,” he said. “There were people on that court like Sandra Day O’Connor, who I think gets way too little credit for what she did. These are people who respected – they were more in that tradition of a civil society, and who would listen to different points of views.”
Thomas added that in his 47 years in D.C., he has seen many people claiming to be principled but then abandoning this once in positions of power. He credited such changes to being “petrified by criticisms” or seduced by praise and retreating into “the tall grass of big words and eloquent phrases.” One example, he said, pertained to the court itself: “It could not possibly have taken my court 60 years to know that Plessy was a hideous wrong.” Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent, Thomas noted, made the right answer “obvious, as it so often is … [p]erhaps what stood in the way was cowardice.” Thomas continued that Plessy-era justices, he said, “made American children like me grow up in a racial caste system because it was easier to do nothing than to do the right thing.”
Thomas ended his speech with a direct appeal to the students present. “Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence,” he said, referring to its closing that “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” “Courage, like cowardice, can be habit forming,” Thomas concluded, “and it will become a part of who you are.”
SCOTUS Quote
“Because I joined the court that dealt with differences as friends, as we respected each other. And I don’t know how that civility – I don’t know how you bring it back in the current environment with social media and name calling and all people accusing each other of various things and animus.”
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