Updated on May 15 at 10:18 a.m.
Are you a Supreme Court nerd looking for property near Boston? We’ve got good news. Justice David Souter’s home in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, has hit the market, and it comes with “a curated collection of books from his personal library.”
At the Court
On Thursday, the court released two opinions in argued cases. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the court unanimously held that a claim that a freight broker negligently hired another company to transport goods is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. In Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties, the court unanimously held that, under the Federal Arbitration Act, a court that has previously put claims in a pending action on hold has the power to confirm or vacate a resulting arbitration award.
After the opinion announcements, the justices met in a private conference to discuss cases and vote on petitions for review. Orders from Thursday’s conference are expected on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
Later on Thursday, the court granted requests from Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro to pause a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that had reinstated a requirement that the abortion pill mifepristone be dispensed only in person. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote dissenting opinions. For more on the case, see the On Site section below.
On Monday, Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general asked the court on its interim docket to reinstate its new congressional map. On Thursday, the Republican legislators who challenged the process by which the map was approved responded to that request. Find Amy’s analysis of the filing in the On Site section.
Also on Thursday, the court granted Texas’ request to vacate a stay of execution granted to Edward Lee Busby by the 5th Circuit. Justice Elena Kagan noted that she would have denied the request. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent from the denial, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Busby was executed Thursday evening.
The court has indicated that it may release opinions on Thursday, May 21, at 10 a.m. EDT. We will be live blogging that morning beginning at 9:30.
Morning Reads
Justice Dept. Accuses Yale Medical School of Discriminating Against White and Asian Applicants
Michael C. Bender, The New York Times (paywalled)
On Thursday, the Department of Justice “accused the Yale School of Medicine of violating anti-discrimination laws” by favoring “Black and Hispanic applicants over more qualified white and Asian students,” according to The New York Times. “Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said Yale was subverting a 2023 Supreme Court decision that overturned race-conscious admissions policies by relying on ‘proxies,’” such as life experiences and cultural events, “to determine the ethnicity of its applicants.” Dhillon emphasized “that applicant-level data provided by Yale show ‘virtually no difference in racial preferences of Yale admissions’ before and after the Supreme Court ruling.” “In a statement on Thursday, Yale said the students it admitted ‘demonstrate exceptional academic achievement and personal commitment’ and that it was ‘confident in the rigorous admissions process.’”
Watchdog groups urge Senate to investigate Samuel Alito over oil stock conflicts
Dharna Noor, The Guardian
Earlier this year, Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from a case brought by Louisiana parishes seeking to hold oil and gas companies liable for damage to the Louisiana coast due to his financial interest in ConocoPhillips. Now, “a coalition of watchdog organizations” is calling on him to recuse himself from a case to be argued next term on efforts to hold oil companies liable for damages allegedly caused by climate change, according to The Guardian. The organizations sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee and asked lawmakers to investigate his “holdings in energy companies.” “His irregular recusal practice in oil and gas industry-related cases is undermining public confidence in the impartiality of the Court,” reads the letter.
Former Oklahoma death row prisoner freed from jail as he awaits retrial in 1997 killing
Jim Vertuno, Associated Press
An Oklahoma judge on Thursday granted a bond to Richard Glossip, who is “awaiting retrial for a 1997 killing that put him on the brink of execution three separate times,” according to the Associated Press. “Glossip had been sentenced to death over the 1997 killing in Oklahoma City of his former boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was beaten with a baseball bat in what prosecutors have alleged was a murder-for-hire scheme. The Supreme Court ruled last year that prosecutors’ decision to allow a key witness to give testimony they knew to be false violated Glossip’s constitutional right to a fair trial.” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has since said that the state will retry Glossip “but not pursue the death penalty again.” Later on Thursday, Glossip “was released from incarceration for the first time in nearly 30 years … after posting bond.”
US appeals court questions Trump's push to punish major law firms
Mike Scarcella and David Thomas, Reuters (paywalled)
On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit appeared “skeptical” of the Trump administration’s defense of executive orders targeting top U.S. law firms, according to Reuters. The orders “sought to bar the firms’ lawyers from accessing federal buildings and to terminate U.S. government contracts held by their clients. The orders also stripped employees of the firms of their government security clearances.” The administration contends that a “law firm’s business relationships, including the lawyers it hires, are not protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.” The firms, which are represented by Paul Clement, counter “that Trump’s executive orders ‘strike at the heart of the First Amendment and the ability of lawyers to zealously represent their clients.’” Reuters noted that the case could ultimately land at the Supreme Court.
On Site
Interim Docket
Court allows for access to abortion pill by mail for now
The Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon issued an order that continued to block a ruling by a federal appeals court in Louisiana which had barred the mailing of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions – the most common form of abortion in the United States. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that the drug companies “cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.” Alito also dissented, calling the court’s order “remarkable.”
Interim Docket
Republican legislators urge justices to leave Virginia Supreme Court’s redistricting ruling in place
Lawyers for a group of Republican legislators (along with an election official and two registered voters) urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon to leave in place a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court which struck down an amendment to that state’s constitution allowing the Virginia General Assembly to enact a new congressional map. Calling the request to pause the state supreme court’s ruling “extraordinary,” the legislators stressed that the case involved “state courts applying state law to hold state actors accountable.”
Contributor Corner
The fact of the matter
In her A Second Opinion column, Haley Proctor reflected on legislative facts – that is, facts of general import that a court considers when resolving legal questions – and the role they play in Second Amendment litigation.
Podcasts
Advisory Opinions
SCOTUS Clears Way for Alabama To Use Congressional Map
Sarah Isgur and David French discuss the court’s decision on Alabama’s congressional maps, the emergency docket filing on Virginia’s congressional map, and a very special 2-1 ruling from a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
A Closer Look
Justice Thomas Todd
How’d you like to be known as the most insignificant [insert your profession here]?
Thomas Todd has been repeatedly labeled “the most insignificant justice,” or – more kindly – a justice who “left a light imprint on the Supreme Court’s history.” We’ll let you decide if the title is appropriate for President Thomas Jefferson’s third appointee to the court.
Todd’s early life was shaped by hardship. Born in 1765 in Virginia, he lost his father before turning two and became an orphan at 11 when his mother died. A family friend ensured he received the classical education his mother had desired for him, but apparently “wasted the rest of Todd’s inheritance.” At 16, Todd enlisted in the Continental Army as a substitute for another draftee; six months of service later, he returned to Liberty Hall (now Washington and Lee University), graduating in 1783.
After graduating, Todd came under the wing of Harry Innes, a cousin to his mother and a Virginia attorney, clerking for Innes and tutoring his daughters in exchange for room and board. In 1784, Innes relocated the household across the Appalachians to present-day Kentucky, and Todd followed. He passed the bar in 1788, married Elizabeth Harris the same year, and opened a practice specializing in land and title disputes (a specialty well-suited to the then-western-expanding United States).
Kentucky achieved statehood in 1792, and Todd penned the first draft of the new state’s constitution before becoming secretary to its inaugural legislature. By 1801 he had joined the Kentucky Court of Appeals (then the state’s highest court) and by 1806 had risen to its chief justice. Congress then added a seventh federal judicial district and a seventh seat to the Supreme Court. Jefferson asked congressional representatives from the new district whom they would recommend, and they named Todd nearly unanimously. The Senate confirmed him by voice vote in March 1807, and Todd took the judicial oath in early May, becoming the first justice from west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Context matters considerably when evaluating Todd’s sparse record on the court. Reaching Washington from his home in Frankfort, Kentucky, required traveling more than 500 miles over roads that were frequently impassable during winter. The Marshall Court was also far from an equal distributor of opinions: Between 1816 and 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote 124 of the court’s 302 opinions – nearly all of the decisions dealing with constitutional issues – while Justices Joseph Story and William Johnson wrote 113 between them, leaving the remaining four justices just 65. When illness kept Todd from the 1823-24 term, Story wrote to tell him his colleagues had wanted his input on multiple occasions, and that several Kentucky land cases had been held over solely because of his absence.
Of the roughly 600 opinions issued during Todd’s tenure from 1807 to 1826, he authored just 14 (11 majority, two concurring, and one dissenting), 10 of which involved land or survey disputes, with his lone non-land opinion being 1824’s Riggs v. Tayloe establishing that original documents must be produced as evidence when available (it’s actually kind of an interesting case).
But let’s return to Todd in the eyes of history – and where his rather poor jurisprudential reputation comes from. In what some might label a bit of a hit job, two separate pieces appeared in the same 1983 issue of the University of Chicago Law Review calling Todd “insignificant.” One professor, working from a “Pages Per Year” metric (applied only to constitutional opinions), “found Todd’s ‘unblemished muteness’ hardest to dismiss, noting he had ‘the longest sustained zero PPY of any Justice’ without having written anything of significance on circuit.” Another went further, deliberately expanding the survey beyond constitutional law to examine every opinion written in every area through Chief Justice Roger Taney’s last term. Using “opinions per opportunity” to adjust for earlier courts’ smaller dockets, Todd’s score came out to 0.022 – roughly one opinion authored per 46 opportunities that came before him (this included cases disposed of by signed opinions, cases disposed of “By the Court,” and any other “opportunities” he would have had to record his views). “The winner by default—in what other way can one win this kind of contest?—is Thomas Todd. Long may he reign,” wrote the author, then-professor (and now 7th Circuit judge) Frank Easterbrook.
Todd died in February 1826, in Frankfort, Kentucky, at 61, survived by eight children and a substantial estate. In his review, White did offer a few counterpoints to the “insignificant” verdict: the characterization, he argued, rests largely on 1) the scarce surviving records and 2) a lack of appreciation for the early Marshall court’s differences, given its circuit riding, Marshall’s near-monopoly on constitutional opinions, and the importance of the land disputes that Todd resolved. So there you go: although Todd will likely never be considered a top-tier justice, his reputation as the court’s most insignificant one may prove a bit overstated (here’s looking at you, Gabriel Duvall).
SCOTUS Quote
“Better to live with the mystery than to rewrite the statute.”
Ask Amy
I sometimes wonder about the correct pronunciation of certain Supreme Court decisions, like this term’s Chatrie case. Like the graduation announcer at a big school, does the chief justice ask how the parties pronounce their names?
Yes, he does – or at least the Supreme Court does, in a form that lawyers submit to the court before a case is argued. That form asks not only for the name of the lawyer who will be arguing the case on behalf of a litigant, but also for a phonetic pronunciation of that lawyer's name. It then does the same thing for the litigant whom the lawyer is representing.
Having said that, phonetic pronunciations will only get you so far, especially if the lawyers (or the paralegals) filling out the forms do not have a background in linguistics. You can see this if you compare the first argument in Louisiana v. Callais (in March 2025) with the reargument seven months later, when Chief Justice John Roberts pronounces both "Callais" and the last name of Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga two different ways.
Confusion over how to pronounce a litigant's name also doesn't always end once the case is decided. As Kelsey noted in the Oct. 16, 2025, edition of SCOTUStoday, during the second oral argument in Callais, the justices couldn't agree on how to pronounce "Gingles," the name of a landmark 1986 redistricting case. Maybe from here on out we can just call it "Thornburg" instead?