We have reached the halfway point of June, meaning the justices have just over two weeks left to wrap up the current term if they want to begin their summer recess in early July. We are awaiting 20 more opinions in argued cases.
At the Court
Orders from the justices’ June 11 conference are expected today at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
The court has indicated that it will next release opinions on Thursday, June 18, at 10 a.m. EDT. We will be live blogging that morning beginning at 9:30.
Morning Reads
With nitrogen gas blocked, Alabama seeks to execute inmate by lethal injection
Ralph Chapoco, Alabama Reflector
In a Friday filing with the Alabama Supreme Court, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office asked for “an expedited motion to set a new execution date for Jeffery Lee,” according to the Alabama Reflector. Lee had been scheduled to be executed with nitrogen gas on Thursday, but a federal district court barred the state from using that execution method, holding that it violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. On Thursday night, the Supreme Court declined to stay or vacate that ruling and allow the execution to proceed. Now, the state seeks to put Lee to death by lethal injection. In his challenge to nitrogen gas execution, Lee indicated that he would prefer to die by firing squad.
Appeals court says U.S. government can keep collecting 10% tariffs for now
Paul Wiseman, Associated Press
On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the Trump administration “can continue collecting the 10% worldwide tariff it imposed in February” – after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under a differently authority – while challenges to the new “levies continue to work their way through the courts,” according to the Associated Press. Challengers contend that the administration did not have the authority to impose the new tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which “is aimed at what it calls ‘fundamental international payments problems.’” They say this doesn’t cover “trade deficits,” as the Trump administration has asserted. “A split three-judge panel of the specialized Court of International Trade ... found the 10% global tariffs were illegal,” but the Federal Circuit has put that decision on hold. The Section 122 tariffs “are set to expire July 24.”
ICE’s detention policy won at the 5th Circuit. Then judges found another way to reject it.
Jessie Blaeser and Kyle Cheney, Politico (paywalled)
In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit allowed ICE “to detain – without bond – thousands of immigrants with established roots in the U.S.” But that ruling has not turned out to be as significant as it, at first, appeared to be, according to Politico. Since February, “[j]udges bound by the appeals court’s holding have overwhelmingly continued to reject ICE’s detention policy. Instead of labeling the policy a violation of [federal immigration] law – an interpretation taken off the table by the 5th Circuit decision – those judges have concluded that ICE has violated detainees’ constitutional due process rights, a distinct violation that the appeals court didn’t address.” Politico noted that federal courts of appeals have split over ICE’s detention policy, which “has put the issue on a likely path to the Supreme Court.”
GOP senators have no backup plan if Supreme Court kills Trump’s birthright citizenship order
Alex Swoyer, The Washington Times
In his Seen, Heard and Whispered column for The Washington Times, Alex Swoyer reported that Republican senators currently have no plans to push a bill ending birthright citizenship if the Supreme Court rules against President Donald Trump on the issue. “There’s no conversation up here, there is none,” said Sen. Rick Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to Swoyer, adding that “he is unaware of a single discussion about what to do with the birthright immigration issue.” During oral argument in the birthright citizenship case on April 1, the “justices appeared skeptical of the administration’s arguments, and the president has indicated he expects to lose the case.”
Assessing Non-Packing Rationales For Increasing the Size of the Supreme Court
Ilya Somin, The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason
In a post for Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin assessed what he described as the “relatively weak” arguments in favor of adding justices to the Supreme Court that are distinct from court packing (adding justices to shift the ideological balance of the court) but that he fears would still risk triggering “the slippery slope escalation caused by court-packing.” Specifically, he explored expanding the court so that the number of justices matches the number of appellate circuit courts (13) and expanding it to enable the court to decide more cases each term. He noted that it may be possible to add justices without changing the ideological balance of the court – by, for example, having both the party that controls the White House and the party that does not choose the same number of new justices – but concluded that “we probably don't need to expand the size of the court to achieve various other improvements in the Court's work product.”
On Site
Opinion Analysis
Justices reject private suits to enforce investor protections against investment companies
On Thursday, a sharply divided court rejected the efforts of investors to sue an investment company to rescind a contract that appears to violate the Investment Company Act of 1940, concluding that only the SEC may bring such a suit. Although the argument suggested considerable sympathy for the investors’ suit, in the end the justices, as they so often have in recent years, refused to “imply” a private right of action not explicitly written into federal law.
Opinion Analysis
Justices reject “rigid” rule punishing omissions by bankrupt debtors
Thursday’s unanimous decision in Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction squarely rejected a “rigid” rule adopted by the lower court to punish the failure of a debtor in bankruptcy to mention one of its assets to the bankruptcy court.
From the SCOTUSblog Team
The European Court of Justice
For SCOTUSblog’s series on different supreme courts around the world, Zach spoke with Gráinne de Búrca, a professor at NYU School of Law and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, about the European Court of Justice.
Podcasts
Advisory Opinions
Can Transgender People Serve in the Military?
Sarah Isgur and David French discuss the three Supreme Court rulings that dropped Thursday morning, a D.C. Circuit decision on President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender military members, and accommodations running rampant at law schools. Oh, and a federal judge charged with battery and destruction of physical property.
Divided Argument
Watch Snobs
Will Baude and Dan Epps open with the usual grab bag – the “foot fault” pun buried in a Justice Thomas opinion, reading Justice Alito’s clerk-hiring tea leaves, and a detour into the metaphysics of conditional resignations and whether you can be confirmed to a vacancy that doesn’t exist yet. They then discuss recent opinions in argued cases.
A Closer Look
The Most Opinions Released in One Day
One question we get asked fairly frequently on our live blogs for opinion announcements is “What is the most opinions the court has ever released on a single day?” We’re not sure if this comes from a place of curiosity or schadenfreude for us here at SCOTUSblog (any more than four opinions released in a day makes for a very long evening), but either way we thought this topic would make for a good Closer Look. Although our research is not quite definitive, the answer appears to be 50 decisions, which were released by Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s court on May 13, 1889.
First, some background on identifying the dates of each opinion’s release. Although opinion release dates are now consistently documented in the U.S. Reports (where the opinions of the Supreme Court are officially published) and in contemporaneous media coverage (such as SCOTUSblog’s), earlier “release dates” are not always so easy to establish.
As Steve Vladeck has explained, the date of a decision does not appear beneath its case name in the first 107 volumes of the U.S. Reports, which leaves a gap concerning the court’s decisions between 1791 and 1882. Fortunately, in 2006, Anne Ashmore from the Supreme Court Library published the Supreme Court’s “Dates of Supreme Court Decisions and Arguments, Volumes 2-107,” after reconstructing the missing dates from handwritten minutes, or records of the court’s daily proceedings, held at the National Archives.
As mentioned, the busiest opinion day in Supreme Court history (as measured by the number of opinions released) appears to have occurred during Fuller’s first term on Monday, May 13, 1889. The Washington Post’s “Court Record” column from May 14, 1889, provides this number of cases decided that day along with motions denied or granted, cases dismissed, and administrative orders from the chief justice. Of the many opinions which came down, New Orleans v. Gaines’ Administrator and Chae Chan Ping v. United States received the most media coverage.
In Gaines’ Administrator, the court awarded the estate of Myra Clark Gaines approximately $576,000 from the city of New Orleans, which had sold property Gaines argued she inherited as her father, Daniel Clark’s, legitimate heir. Clark was, apparently, Gaines’ father by a secret marriage. “This case probably has been the most interesting, the hardest contested, and the most prolonged known to the judicial history of this country. … [The] secret marriage formed the axis on which the litigation revolved and the case was fought with bitterness by both sides,” The Washington Post wrote the following day. The case is, to date, one of the longest-running civil suits in U.S. history; it lasted 57 years and had 17 court filings at the Supreme Court.
In Chae Chan Ping, better known as the Chinese Exclusion case, the court upheld the Scott Act of 1888, which barred Chinese laborers from re-entering the U.S. after visiting China even if they had valid work certificates, stating that Congress had the power to exclude foreign nationals.
Returning to the number of opinions, a release of 50 opinions was actually not a total anomaly in the late 19th and early 20th century (e.g., there were 49 opinions on March 4, 1895; 47 on March 2, 1896; and 45 on March 2, 1925).
That said, these opinion “releases” occurred in a very different format than they do today. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, justices announced their opinions aloud from the bench, but there was no printed text distributed to the press on decision day. Reporters sitting in the courtroom took notes as the justices spoke, which is how the newspaper accounts of decisions like the Post's detailed "Court Record" column were likely compiled; the court also did not officially publish its decisions, meaning they were instead published by private reporters who then vended the publications for profit (look for a future Closer Look on this).
Additionally, the length of the 50 individual opinions varied greatly; five opinions were around 1-2 pages, nine others were roughly 3-5 pages, and 16 were 6-10 pages (these numbers are approximated from the start pages in the U.S. Reports via the Supreme Court Database). Also of note: the court did not have discretion over its docket until 1925 (another future Closer Look!), so they were taking many more cases (252 cases in 1889, per the SCDB).
By way of comparison, on Feb. 21, 2018, Supreme Court reporter (and recent Advisory Opinions guest) Nina Totenberg wrote a story with the headline, “Supreme Court Gets Moving, Issuing As Many Decisions In One Day As It Has In 5 Months.” That Wednesday, the court issued four decisions.
SCOTUS Quote
“The classic criticism of using legislative history [to help decide cases] is that it is ‘the equivalent of entering a crowded cocktail party and looking over the heads of the guests for one’s friends.’ True to form, the dissent navigates around unwelcome guests.”
— FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, Ltd. (2026)
