The Court has been criticized for releasing only four opinion going into the winter break and Linda Greenhouse even suggested that internal wrangling over Citizens United may have “sucked the air out of the term.” Maybe so, but the Court has done nothing publicly to suggest that this term is progressing differently from any other. [...]

The Supreme Court handed down only orders this morning, meaning the next possible time for it to release an opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is early next year.
Several commentators, most notably John Elwood on Volokh Conspiracy and Tony Mauro for the Legal Times, have considered the possible reasons and consequences of the [...]

The Court sat for its traditional “class photo” yesterday, to the apparent amusement of less than half the members of the current Court.

You can also find a video taken at the loosely termed “photo shoot” here. I should note that the Court released a few different photos from the shoot and in all of them, [...]

Well, I made a mistake yesterday. Relying on the WSJ Law Blog’s onsite observer, I reported that General Kagan had worn a blue pants suit. I was wrong.
In fact, the Washington Post and Above the Law are now reporting that General Kagan chose a black suit with a light blue blouse with which to disgrace [...]

For all the trivia nerds out there, I forgot to mention two important, but oft-unmentioned facts about yesterday’s argument.
General Kagan opted not to wear the traditional grey morning coat that male Solicitors General wear. Instead, according to the WSJ Law Blog, she wore a blue pants suit. Of course, the writing was on the wall.
Additionally, [...]

In anticipation of Sonia Sotomayor’s first oral argument next week, C-SPAN has revealed a 10-minute excerpt of interviews with several Supreme Court Justices. C-SPAN had previously announced that October 4-12 would be “Supreme Court Week” featuring interviews with each of the Justices, but it has announced just excerpts from those interviews that deal with issues [...]

I’ve never noticed these before, but the Supreme Court posts brief summaries of each case on its website before the cases are published in the official US Reports. You can find the summaries on the Court’s site here. I also compiled a PDF of the summaries for OT08 cases that you can find here.
The summaries [...]

This weekend, I went through all the oral argument transcripts from OT00 through OTO8 and I counted how many times each of the major advocates has argued before the Supreme Court. I know that I’ve got all of the big advocates (10+ arguments), but I might be missing a few of the advocates with less. [...]

Solicitor General Kagan has filed a motion for divided argument in Citizens United v. FEC, according to SCOTUSblog.
If the motion is granted, the division would create for a very interesting dynamic for the Court’s special September 9 sitting.
30 minutes – Ted Olson
20 minutes – Elena Kagan
10 minutes – Seth Waxman
Frequent readers of this blog [...]

While I will readily accept that my end-of-term comments are even less relevant than usual because they are so belligerently late, I still think I have a few interesting things to point out about the nearly-finished term.
First, and least controversially, Justice Kennedy still controls an important position in the middle of the Court. Justice Kennedy [...]