Updated Most of you know that the Court hears cases during two-week sessions every month from October to April. During most sessions, the Court will hear 8-12 cases and majority opinion assignments are distributed equally for each session. In other words, if there are nine cases for the October session, each justice will write one [...]

After the Court released its opinion in Perdue v. Kenny A. yesterday, there was only one case left from the October sitting: Salazar v. Buono. The only justice who hasn’t written a majority opinion from October is Justice Kennedy. Barring an incredibly surprising turn of events, Justice Kennedy will be writing the majority opinion in [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]