It’s been three years since local country music icons Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and NASCAR racing legend Kevin Harvick, became the first local figures to be honored on the Oildale Wall of Fame.Read more

United Airlines plans to launch once-daily flights this summer between Meadows Field Airport and Los Angeles International Airport, a spokeswoman for Kern County government confirmed Friday.Read more

The Bakersfield Police Department is asking for help finding a teenager considered at-risk because she has never before run away.Read more

A restaurant chain that put down roots in Oildale 36 years ago is returning to North Chester Avenue, admittedly without its full, sit-down atmosphere but still offering hard-to-find dishes longtime customers have come to appreciate.Read more

Clear Statements is a recurring series by Abbe R. Gluck on civil litigation and the modern regulatory and statutory state.The Supreme Court on Monday heard argument in Monsanto Co. v Durnell, a complex dispute over whether a federal law governing pesticide labeling and registration prevented a Missouri jury from awarding $1.25 million to a volunteer gardener who alleged that Monsanto had failed to warn that its popular weed killer Roundup causes cancer. The preemption arguments – which centered around whether state law could add a warning requirement when the federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, has not required any warning – are intricate and have been widely covered elsewhere, except for one aspect involving administrative deference that I will return to at the end of this column. But first, it’s worth zooming out to understand the case’s importance for the bigger picture – not only for the billions of dollars at stake in the more than 60,000 Roundup cases proceeding across the nation, but also for how the case implicates important, and complicated, questions about class actions and other forms of mass litigation.First, the Missouri jury trial involved just one plaintiff, but there are thousands of other lawsuits pending. One set of those lawsuits is currently in a rush to settle, specifically before a deadline of June 4, which is prior to when the Supreme Court decision is expected. The plaintiffs considering that settlement now have to decide whether to agree to a $7.25 billion deal without knowing whether the court will uphold the Missouri verdict. The deal has some potential weaknesses, but if the court rules for the company, the plaintiffs’ bargaining power could drop dramatically. And any settlement in the state court will have ripple effects in the parallel federal lawsuits happening across the country.Like many complicated mass cases involving health harms, the Roundup cases have been filed in both state and federal courts, through different aggregating procedures. The federal action is proceeding as a “multi-district litigation.” MDLs have emerged over the past decade as a key class-action substitute: mass harms are often not strong candidates for federal class actions under recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, because the court demands a high level of commonality among claims that can be very difficult to satisfy when individual illnesses are an issue. As a substitute, MDLs are formed when many similar individual cases are filed in federal courts across the country; those cases are then consolidated and transferred for pretrial management to a single-federal judge – this time, Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California. Once centralized in this way, most MDLs face enormous pressure to craft a centralized settlement, and the vast majority (more than 97%) do settle – even though the governing statute contemplates that individuals will ultimately return to their original courts for their own trials.The other mass case here is the parallel case filed in state court in Missouri. That case was filed about two months ago, as a “settlement class action,” on behalf of some 40,000 plaintiffs. A settlement class action is a special animal: It’s a case that is filed with the purposes of settling immediately and taking advantage of class action’s efficiencies to do so. That is why cases filed as settlement class actions almost immediately produce resolution rather than proceeding through pretrial work.This particular settlement class action has stirred controversy. Commentators and objectors have complained that the settlement gives too much money to the lawyers and too little to the harmed individuals. They also have complained that the settlement inappropriately incentivizes the lawyers to push clients to accept the deal: Any lawyer with more than 25 clients who do not accept must forfeit their own legal fees under the terms of the settlement. That, some argue, creates unseemly pressure on lawyers to push clients to accept the offer. Finally, the settlement’s deadline to join – June 4, even though the Supreme Court is likely to rule after that in Durnell – has sparked criticism for forcing the parties to make their decisions in a vacuum before knowing how Monsanto’s preemption claim turns out. Of course, that’s probably the point – accepting the settlement is like taking a bet.Looking through a wider lens, the settlement also has highlighted some interesting questions about judicial power over mass harms litigation in general. First, there is a question of jurisdiction – does the Missouri court really have power to bind all of these litigants, from across the country, including those who have not yet even filed claims? Modern American class action jurisprudence relies on the twin ideas of representation and consent to justify these far-flung actions: the named plaintiffs and their lawyers ensure that everyone involved, even those far away, are properly represented in the litigation and plaintiffs’ ability to opt out of the class means those who remain have effectively consented to their claims being decided in a state different from their own. In recent years, however, some scholars, including myself and Elizabeth Burch, have started to ask questions about whether these traditional guardrails are really enough. Should there be more due process protections for plaintiffs for these kinds of cases? In this particular case, the parties are currently engaged in a heated dispute over whether it’s easy enough for plaintiffs to opt out, whether the terms of the settlement are fair, and whether the lawyers and representative plaintiffs are really doing an adequate job representing everyone.Another big-picture question involves the relationship between state and federal courts in these kinds of complex cases. Massive federal MDLs tend to exert great leverage over national litigations over public harms – to the surprise of many, they even exert leverage over cases not actually in the MDL. In the nationwide opioid litigation, for example, it has been widely reported that litigators in state courts, including state attorneys general, were brought to the bargaining table in the federal MDL to work out a global settlement – that is, a settlement that would cover everyone, including those in state-court cases. Sometimes this leverage leads to questionable practices. One such practice that has raised eyebrows is when MDL judges require attorneys in parallel state cases to pay into the MDL’s common benefit fund to cover some of attorneys’ fees for the lead MDL lawyers, on the theory that everyone benefits from a global settlement. Another practice that some have criticized is MDL judges’ tendency to view anything less than global settlement as a kind of failure. Burch and I have argued that, instead, more remands of MDL cases to their original courts would allow for better state law development and give more individual plaintiffs a sense of agency over their own cases.The Roundup litigation offers an interesting twist on this kind of state-federal dance. First, this time, it is the state-court-based settlement, not the federal MDL, that is exerting the pressure with its aggressive timeline. The state settlement also sweeps in all cases that are not in the MDL – and lawyers leading the state cases have argued that includes cases that were originally part of the MDL but have since been remanded back to their original jurisdictions for just the kind of individual trials that some of us have advocated. Some plaintiffs have responded that those MDL remand cases do not belong in the state settlement at all, on the ground they should still be considered creatures of the federal MDL – in other words, just because those cases were sent back to their original courts after pretrial work in the MDL does not mean they should now be swept up in a new state-court class action (at least not without clear notice and an easy opt out). This is a novel, and admittedly wonky, but important question about the status of cases that are originally part of an MDL and then are sent home after the MDL works through the pretrial stage. But this is exactly what the MDL statute initially contemplated even if, in practice, global settlement has been much more frequent than remands.This story is made all the more interesting by the fact that the MDL judge here, Chhabria, has been one of the most vocal advocates of MDLs relinquishing some of their centralizing power and effectuating more remands. (He also refused to make state counsel pay into the federal MDLs common benefit fund in this case.) And in fact, there is a motion pending before him asking the federal court to intervene in aspects of the state settlement. At a hearing on Thursday, Chhabria raised questions about the Missouri state court’s jurisdiction and the fairness of the settlement, calling the whole situation “mind boggling” – but still expressed concern about the idea of federal court interference. Here, Chhabria’s efforts to practice what he preaches may thus lead some of his remanded MDL cases to be swept into the state class action and otherwise limit his influence over the state proceeding.Finally, let’s return to administrative deference and the Loper Bright issue that popped up at oral argument in Durnell. This relates to the question of the state/federal relationship, but in a different way. At oral argument, Justice Samuel Alito asked whether Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo – the 2024 case that overruled the 40-year-old regime of deference to administrative agency statutory interpretations set forth in Chevron v. Natural Resource Defense Council – also applies to agency decisions about whether their authorities displace state law, a question known as “ administrative preemption. “For those who followed Chevron’s demise over the past decade, the question came as a surprise. Prior to Loper Bright, the court had considered administrative preemption several times. Most recently, in the 2013 case of City of Arlington v. FCC , Chief Justice John Roberts in dissent expressed concern that an agency could have so much authority as to receive deference about the limits of its own powers versus the states. To that, Justice Antonin Scalia replied, in essence, either you’re okay with Chevron or you’re not – Chevron gave agencies discretion to interpret their governing statutes, which in turn meant that they indeed were being deferred to about decisions about the boundaries of their own authority in virtually every case, including those involving the states. Loper Bright undid the Chevron regime, and one would have thought settled the question in Arlington in the chief’s favor. Yet Alito left the question open, stating that, while the court may ultimately decide as much, “it’s not there now.” Ironically, the idea that deference remains for an agency’s interpretation of its authority to preempt state law would mean that one of the most controversial applications of Chevron is also one of the few to survive the case’s demise.As for the ongoing Roundup litigation, it’s always possible that the settlement winds will shift in the wake of the argument. But either way, the case raises bigger picture questions about the future of aggregate public harms litigation and federalism that we will surely see again.Read more

On April 15, the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office released a remarkable three-sentence statement. In that statement, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called remarks that she had recently made about a colleague “inappropriate” and “hurtful,” and she indicated that she had apologized to that individual.Although Sotomayor did not identify the colleague by name, anyone paying attention knew to whom she was referring: Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Specifically, at an April 7 appearance at the University of Kansas Law School, Sotomayor criticized Kavanaugh for his solo concurrence in Noem v. Perdomo, a case involving immigration stops. In that opinion, Kavanaugh explained why he thought the stay preventing some of the government’s such practices was warranted. Even if U.S. citizens or individuals in the country lawfully were stopped by immigration officers, he wrote, the stops are “typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free” after proving they are “legally in the United States.” Without naming him, Sotomayor suggested that Kavanaugh had come from privilege, as “a man whose parents were professionals” and who “probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” As Amy noted, remarks like Sotomayor’s were extremely unusual, and the formal apology that followed only underscored how far outside the ordinary they fell.But that was not the only intra-court criticism this spring. In a Yale Law School lecture on April 13, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered a sustained critique of her conservative colleagues’ emergency orders in favor of the Trump administration, calling them “scratch-paper musings” that can “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow.” In that regard, Jackson described roughly two dozen orders from last year allowing controversial Trump administration policies on immigration and federal funding to take effect after lower courts found them (likely) unlawful.And Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking on the same day that Sotomayor’s apology was issued, lamented that he had “joined the court that dealt with differences as friends,” strongly implying that was no longer the case. Thomas also criticized those who “recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences and their country.” (The Wall Street Journal quoted a political scientist who said, “It certainly sounds like [Thomas is] talking about John Roberts.”)All of which raises a natural question: are moments like these truly rare in the court’s history? The short answer is yes – but they are not entirely without precedent.The first feud(?)Perhaps the earliest known feud took place between John Jay, the nation’s first chief justice, and John Rutledge, an associate justice – although not when they were on the court together.Their dispute began when Jay negotiated the controversial “Jay Treaty” with Great Britain in 1794, which aimed to maintain peace between the two countries. (Among other things, it settled claims for American citizens who had their property damaged by the British during the Revolutionary War.) But Jay was seen by many as too sympathetic to the British, and the congressional fight over the treaty’s passage is even said to have led to the creation of national political parties. When Jay resigned to become governor of New York in 1795, President George Washington tapped Rutledge – who had served briefly as an associate justice before resigning in 1791 – to replace him as a recess appointee.Following his appointment, Rutledge gave a fiery speech in Charleston, South Carolina, denouncing the very treaty his predecessor had negotiated, allegedly declaring that he “had rather the President should die than sign that puerile instrument.” The Federalist-leaning press, which supported the treaty, pilloried Rutledge and circulated rumors of his mental instability. The Senate subsequently rejected Rutledge’s formal nomination as chief justice that December by a vote of 14 to 10 – the first time the Senate had ever voted down a Supreme Court nominee. A distraught Rutledge, to date the chief justice with the shortest tenure in history, then attempted to drown himself but was saved by two enslaved men who witnessed the incident.Marshall and his first dissenterIn assuming the role of chief in 1801, John Marshall encouraged his colleagues to adopt unanimous decisions delivered by a single voice (that is, without any public disagreements or separate opinions by each justice). This held for several years.That is, until President Thomas Jefferson (Marshall’s “long-time foe”) appointed William Johnson from South Carolina as a counterweight to Marshall, believing the young justice’s non-Federalist views would break the chief justice’s grip on the court. Johnson’s colleagues, however, found him disrespectful, with Johnson being a great deal younger than the rest of the bench but lording over it, and at times writing separately in direct opposition to Marshall – which likely undermined his ability to build coalitions against the chief justice in the first place. Nevertheless, Johnson persisted, writing roughly half of all dissents under the Marshall court and fervently rejecting the “practice of silent opposition that had been adhered to by the other Justices.” Indeed, after issuing his first concurrence, Johnson reported to Jefferson that he “heard nothing [from his brethren] but Lectures on the Indecency of Judges cutting at each other.”Taney and CurtisThe mid-19th century produced a new, and arguably higher stakes, intra-court dispute. In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford – widely considered the worst decision in the court’s history – holding that Black Americans could not be citizens of the United States under the Constitution. Justice Benjamin Curtis responded with a dissent that prompted Taney to delay issuing the majority opinion by several weeks while he added (what Curtis estimated to be) “upwards of eighteen pages” of rebuttal. “No one can read [the opinion] without perceiving that they are in reply to my opinion,” Curtis said.During this time, Taney withheld the full text of the majority opinion from Curtis – and when Curtis asked Taney for an explanation (suggesting it was a violation of the court’s rules to withhold the opinion for so long), Taney wrote: “It would seem from your letter to me … that you suppose you are entitled to demand it as a right, being one of the members of the tribunal. This would undoubtedly be the case if you wished it to aid you in the discharge of your official duties. But I understand you as not desiring or intending it for that purpose.” The conflict then spilled beyond the courtroom. Taney accused Curtis of leaking his dissent to the press for political purposes; the public could read Curtis’ dissent in full, but only a summary of the majority opinion was available (Taney did not release the full opinion immediately, which he continued to revise) – giving “Republicans a definite advantage in the war of words” that Taney found embarrassing. Taney wrote that he “observed that the opinion of the Court ha[d] been greatly misunderstood and grossly misrepresented in publications in the newspapers.”Curtis denied the accusation, but the acrimony had become irreparable. He resigned from the bench that September. In letters to friends, Curtis cited his inadequate salary, but some have noted that the internal discord following Dred Scott, and his rancorous relationship with Taney, were also key factors in his departure from the court.McReynoldsThe early 20th century brought another ugly dispute. When President Woodrow Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish justice in 1916, this antagonized at least one sitting colleague: James McReynolds, whom Wilson had appointed two years earlier.A militant antisemite, McReynolds refused to speak to Brandeis for the first three years of Brandeis’ tenure. He would rise and leave the room whenever Brandeis spoke during the justices’ private conference, while also refusing to sign any opinions written by him. When Benjamin Cardozo, who was also Jewish, was being considered for the court in 1932, McReynolds joined his two colleagues, Justices Pierce Butler and Willis Van Devanter, in urging the White House not to “afflict the Court with another Jew.” President Herbert Hoover did not listen. During Cardozo’s swearing-in ceremony, McReynolds pointedly read a newspaper (muttering the words “another one”), and he did not sign the farewell letter when Brandeis retired in 1939. (Indeed, there is no official photo of the 1924 court because McReynolds would not sit next to Brandeis.) Later on, McReynolds refused to attend Felix Frankfurter’s investiture, decrying “another Jew on the Court!”Repulsed by McReynolds’ actions, Chief Justice William Howard Taft once described him as “selfish to the last degree” and “fuller of prejudice than any man I have ever known.”The Black-Jackson feudPerhaps the best-known example of justices attacking one another in public was the 1946 feud between Justice Hugo Black and Justice Robert Jackson – which legal scholar Steve Vladeck has described as involving “one of the more impertinent public statements ever made by a sitting Justice.”By way of summary: Jackson was the fourth in a quartet of Roosevelt appointees, joining the court in 1941 that included Black, Justice William O. Douglas, and Frankfurter. Jackson and Black had little in common in terms of their backgrounds beyond their historical support for the New Deal: Black came from the deep South and Jackson from New York, and while Black had been a former senator, Jackson had very little practical political experience.The two feuded over process and jurisdictional questions almost from the start, with Jackson scolding Black for making everything personal. As Jackson once said of his fellow justice, “[y]ou just can’t disagree with him. You must go to war with him if you disagree.” He also remarked that “[w]ith few exceptions, we all knew which side of a case Black would vote on when he read the names of the parties.”Black did not retaliate publicly, although he was not entirely passive; rumors soon circulated in Washington that Black and Douglas had leaked to reporters that they would resign if Jackson were appointed as chief justice.Things came to a head following the death of Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone in the spring of 1946. Jackson, then in Nuremberg serving as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal, became convinced that Black had lobbied President Harry Truman against appointing him to the court’s center seat — although Jackson had understood FDR to have promised him this. When Truman instead nominated his Treasury Secretary, Fred Vinson, Jackson sent a public cable to both congressional judiciary committees, making public what had previously been an intra-court dispute. In particular, he drew on an internal fight over whether Black should have participated in an earlier labor case, Jewell Ridge Coal Corp. v. Local 6167, given that Black’s former law partner had argued for the prevailing side. During the case, Jackson and Frankfurter had wanted to write a statement questioning Black’s participation, but Black had fought back, and a bitter argument ensued at the justices’ conference. As Jackson’s telegram put it, if “war is declared on me, I propose to wage it with the weapons of the open warrior, not those of the stealthy assassin.”According to Vladeck, who cited Professor Dennis Hutchinson, this cable is the only time in the court’s history that a justice “publicly accused another of unethical behavior and of manipulating the decision-making process for personal ends.” Black responded with “dignified silence,” “ever concerned about public actions that might tarnish the public’s image of the Supreme Court,” and “even when publicly pummeled by one or more of his brethren … insisted on remaining silent in public.”Both men resumed a working relationship after Jackson returned from Nuremberg that fall. But Jackson wrote in a private memo that their disagreements were “intellectual matters, fundamental to their respective characters. They are not likely ever to be reconciled to each other’s viewpoint, however much each respects the other’s ability.”The (other) Black feudThe other major feud of the mid-20th century on the court also involved Black, as well as Douglas — in a decades-long clash with Frankfurter. The latter two had begun as close friends and New Deal allies. In fact, when Roosevelt named Douglas to the court, Frankfurter had been enthusiastic, saying that Douglas was “badly” needed on the bench: “We shall have a man who is historic-minded about the law, but also knows that history is not a tale of dead things but part of a dynamic process.”Upon arriving on the court in 1939, Frankfurter had expected to help lead it, having studied the institution for 25 years as one of the country’s most respected law professors, watching it, as he once said, “as closely as a mother would a sick child.” Frankfurter took that metaphor a little too seriously, however, often treating his colleagues as children in need of correcting rather than his brethren.From the start, Frankfurter and Black clashed over court doctrine and the role of the judiciary, with Douglas siding with Black. While Frankfurter believed courts should emphasize process and defer to legislatures whenever possible, Black and Douglas saw a more powerful judiciary as vital to a healthy society.This intellectual dispute quickly became personal. Frankfurter “took the refusal of the brethren to follow his lead as a personal affront, and unfortunately allowed full play to his considerable talent for invective.” At the justices’ private conference, he would speak for exactly 50 minutes — the length of a Harvard lecture, as Justice Potter Stewart recalled — and Douglas could be “absolutely devastating” in his attacks on Frankfurter – both personally and professionally – afterward. On one occasion, Douglas told his colleagues: “When I came into this conference, I agreed in the conclusion that Felix [Frankfurter] has just announced. But he’s talked me out of it.” And when bored during Frankfurter’s talks, Douglas would simply leave the table and go to a sofa, where he would lie down until his colleague was finished speaking.In his private writings, Frankfurter referred to Black, Douglas, and their allies as “the Axis” (among the worst insults possible during World War II) and described Douglas, in diaries and letters, as one of “the two completely evil men I have ever met,” “malignant,” and “the most cynical, shamelessly amoral character I’ve ever known” (along with a Yiddish epithet for bastard). Douglas returned the treatment, referring to Frankfurter in private as “Der Fuehrer,” “a little bastard,” “Machiavellian,” “divisive,” and a “prevaricator.”The conflict arguably had institutional costs. By the 1943-44 term, 58% of court’s decisions came down with divided opinions – the most in the court’s history. Frankfurter himself complained near the end of the next term about “an increasing tendency on the part of members of the Court to behave like little schoolboys and throw spitballs at one another” — apparently without recognizing his own role in the problem.The conflict survived even the court’s private attempts at resolution. In November 1960, Douglas drafted a memo, which he ultimately did not send after Chief Justice Earl Warren persuaded him otherwise, threatening to withdraw from the justices’ conferences entirely while Frankfurter remained on the bench. “The continuous violent outbursts against me in Conference by my Brother Frankfurter give me great concern,” he wrote. “But he’s an ill man; and these violent outbursts create a fear in my heart that one of them may be his end. I do not consciously do anything to annoy him. But twenty-odd years have shown that I am a disturbing symbol in his life.” The conflict persisted until Frankfurter’s retirement in August 1962, forced by a stroke. Douglas did not attend Frankfurter’s funeral three years later.The modern courtThe recent past offers one instructive – and ultimately more hopeful – relationship. In his 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges dissent from the court’s ruling on same-sex marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia insulted his colleague Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in unusually acerbic terms (even for Scalia). He called the opinion “couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” “profoundly incoherent,” and “lacking even a thin veneer of law.” Scalia took things even further in a remarkable footnote, stating that he would “rather hide [his] head in a bag” than sign it, and that “[t]he Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” And, commenting on the court’s lack of geographic diversity (and how that reflected on its jurisprudence), Scalia stated that Kennedy was not a “genuine Westerner” because “California does not count.”According to Kennedy’s memoir, Life, Law & Liberty, the episode damaged their relationship for months: Scalia stopped coming to group lunches and no longer stopped by to chat. Kennedy’s children were, he writes, “devastated” by the dissent’s tone. By Kennedy’s account, however, in February 2016, Scalia walked down the corridor to Kennedy’s chambers and apologized for having been so intemperate. The two men hugged. But it was the last conversation they ever had; Scalia died in Texas about a week later.Why now?What distinguishes the current moment from past episodes of intra-court tension is not any single incident but the concentration of them — and, more importantly, their apparent cause. Some observers point to the interim docket as the primary engine of the current friction.In her September dissent from the court’s unsigned order in Trump v. Slaughter (in which the court agreed to hear the case of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter and paused the district court’s order preventing Slaughter’s firing without citing cause for doing so) Justice Elena Kagan wrote that this docket “should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars.” Kagan was referring to the court’s 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which held that when Congress creates independent, multi-member regulatory agencies, the commissioners can only be removed “for cause.” Still more, she added, it should not be used to transfer “government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.” Sotomayor has likewise condemned what she called “grave misuse[s] of our emergency docket.” (Recall, too, that it was an interim docket order that triggered Sotomayor’s now-retracted remarks at the University of Kansas School of Law.) As CNN summarized in April, the interim docket has been “at the center of several recent instances of tension between the justices spilling out into public view.”The structural differences of the interim docket – not just its substance – may also contribute to this. Merits cases generally arrive with full briefing, oral argument, and time for the justices to work through their disagreements before any opinion is circulated, much less published. Interim docket decisions frequently offer no reasoning at all, so for justices who disagree with those orders, the only recourse – in some ways – is through a public dissent, because there is no reasoning to which to respond in the opinion. This means that what might otherwise be an internal disagreement becomes, by necessity, a public one.Whether the current tensions will harden into the kind of lasting personal enmity that defined the Black-Jackson or Frankfurter-Douglas era remains to be seen. But the historical record at least offers grounds for some cautious optimism. The court has survived feuds far more personal and sustained than anything on display this spring – and has emerged, if not unscathed, at least intact. The McReynolds-Brandeis antipathy endured for more than two decades. The Frankfurter-Douglas war outlasted one justice’s career. Even Jackson’s public telegram, which seemed to many observers to threaten the court’s legitimacy, eventually faded. The institution survived. It should here, too.Read more

When you hear “courts and AI,” what comes to your mind? Likely the many recent articles about lawyers making costly, AI-generated mistakes or the growing debate over whether AI bots make for good judges. Against this (somewhat depressing) backdrop, the On the Docket project is hoping to show that AI can improve public engagement with the Supreme Court by presenting the justices’ work in new ways. During and after Wednesday’s argument in Mullin v. Doe, a case on whether the Trump administration properly ended temporary protected status for Haitian and Syrian nationals, On the Docket released videos that paired the actual audio from the courtroom with AI-generated visuals.Week in ReviewThe court heard five arguments this week, during the second half of the April sitting. Here are the links to SCOTUSblog’s coverage.Chatrie v. United States: Case Preview and Argument AnalysisMonsanto v. Durnell: Case Preview and Argument AnalysisCisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I: Case Preview and Argument AnalysisMullin v. Doe: Case Preview and Argument AnalysisHikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc.: Case Preview and Argument AnalysisAnd on Wednesday, the court released its opinions in two cases: Louisiana v. Callais and First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport.In Callais, a 6-3 court held that Louisiana’s map creating a second majority-black district was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”In First Choice, a unanimous court held that a religious nonprofit organization could challenge a subpoena demanding the identities of its financial supporters in federal court.At the CourtToday, the justices will meet in a private conference to discuss cases and vote on petitions for review. Orders from that conference are expected on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT.On Thursday, the court denied requests for a stay of execution from James Hitchcock, who was sentenced to death in Florida for the murder of his step-niece, Cynthia Driggers, and James Broadnax, who was sentenced to death in Texas for the murders of Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler. Both men were executed last night.The court has not yet indicated when it will next release opinions.Morning ReadsLouisiana congressional primaries are suspended as a result of the Supreme Court’s rulingSara Cline, Jack Brook, and David A. Lieb, Associated PressOn Thursday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry “issued an executive order postponing the U.S. House primary” in his state in response to the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, according to the Associated Press. “Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters,” Landry said. “This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map.” Without the executive order, early voting in the House primary would have begun in Louisiana on Saturday. Early voting will still begin then for “[a]ll other races on the ballot,” and the secretary of state’s office “said it would post notices at early voting sites alerting the public about the suspended congressional primary.”Trump says Tennessee plans to redistrict, Gov. Lee noncommittalStuart Dyos, Vivian Jones, and Rachel Wegner, Nashville Tennessean (paywalled)On Thursday, President Donald Trump said in a social media post that Tennessee will also pursue redistricting after Wednesday’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. “I had a very good conversation with Governor Bill Lee, of Tennessee, this morning wherein he stated that he would work hard to correct the unconstitutional flaw in the Congressional Maps of the Great State of Tennessee,” the president wrote, according to The Tennessean, which noted that “[r]edrawing Tennessee’s districts in time for the 2026 elections would require an expedited timeline and heightened logistical challenges. … Early voting for the August primaries is scheduled to begin July 17.”First Trump tariff refunds expected about May 11 Zach Schonfeld, The HillU.S. Court of International Trade Judge Richard Eaton revealed on Wednesday that the “federal government is expecting to issue the first refunds of President Trump’s invalidated tariffs on or about May 11,” according to The Hill. U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s refund request system “went live last week. Importers have already successfully uploaded 21 percent of the affected entries into the system, according to Eaton’s new order.” However, Eaton noted that some issues, “including long wait times and problems with resetting usernames and passwords,” persist, and that he spoke with the government about addressing them. CBP will “submit a new update” about the refund process “to the court by May 12.”The Comey indictment could be upended by this 2015 Supreme Court precedentPerry Stein, The Washington Post (paywalled)On Tuesday, former FBI director James B. Comey was indicted “for allegedly threatening President Donald Trump” by posting a photo last year “showing seashells on a beach arranged to spell out ’86 47.’” However, the criminal indictment “appears to fall short of a standard articulated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in a 2015 opinion, when the Supreme Court pointedly distinguished a genuine threat from mere speech,” legal analysts told The Washington Post. “Roberts, along with a majority of the court, ruled in the 2015 case Elonis v. United States that prosecutors seeking to convict someone of sending a dangerous message must prove the person intended to make a violent threat – or at least knew there was a substantial chance it would be viewed as threatening.” “At a news conference announcing Comey’s indictment Tuesday, acting attorney general Todd Blanche said he understood that prosecutors need to prove intent, and he said they would do so at trial.”Breyer makes case for civic educationLiz Mineo, The Harvard GazetteDuring a recent event at Harvard University, retired “Justice Stephen Breyer argued that civic education could help reduce polarization and strengthen citizenship,” according to The Harvard Gazette. He recalled visiting the California Legislature as a child and how it “helped spark his interest in public service.” “When asked about the role of the Supreme Court in civic education, Breyer said that justices should write in a clear way to ensure that citizens understand both the complexities and the practical impact of a ruling.” He noted that he said as much to the Dalai Lama, when, during a visit to the Supreme Court, the spiritual leader asked how the court approaches writing a difficult decision.On SiteFrom the SCOTUSblog TeamAfter major voting rights ruling, parties dispute whether the Supreme Court should finalize decision immediately to allow changes to Louisiana’s congressional mapOn Wednesday evening, the group of “non-African American” voters who prevailed earlier in the day in their challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map asked the Supreme Court to bypass its normal 32-day waiting period and send a copy of its opinion and order to the lower court immediately, making the decision final. On Thursday, the Black voters who defended the map urged the court to turn down the request.Opinion AnalysisCourt unanimously sides with faith-based pregnancy centers in litigation dispute with New Jersey The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a group of faith-based pregnancy centers can litigate their challenge to New Jersey’s demands for information about the group’s fundraising practices in federal court. In a unanimous decision by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the justices rejected the lower courts’ conclusion that the group, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, had not shown it had suffered the kind of injury from the subpoena that would give it a legal right to sue, known as standing.Argument AnalysisJustices poised to protect generics manufacturers from liability for decisions of pharmacists about prescribing their productsWednesday’s argument in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA v. Amarin Pharma showed a bench once again dubious about litigation trying to hold a large company responsible for the actions of others that it does not control.Contributor CornerSupreme court ordersIn his Nuts and Bolts column, Stephen Wermiel explained the significance of a Supreme Court order list, which he said “operates much like a traffic report, sorting cases into those that will be argued and those on which review is denied, and cleaning up numerous other details of the work of the justices.”Contributor CornerChurch autonomy returns to SCOTUSIn her Ratio Decidendi column, Stephanie Barclay explored U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops v. O’Connell, “a case asking how broadly the First Amendment’s church autonomy doctrine – which prevents courts from delving into internal church affairs – reaches.” She joined one of 15 amicus, or “friend of the court,” briefs urging the court to take up the case.PodcastsAdvisory OpinionsGutting the Voting Rights Act | Interview: Judge Roy K. AltmanSarah Isgur and David French discuss the Louisiana v. Callais decision, weird indictments, and whether Israel is guilty of genocide. A Closer LookChief Justice William RehnquistIt’s hard to believe, but we have reached William Rehnquist in our series on chief justices of the Supreme Court, John Roberts’ immediate predecessor. To give a glimpse of the man: When Rehnquist’s elementary school teacher asked him what he wanted to do when he was older, the future chief justice supposedly replied: “I’m going to change the government.” And although it took a few decades, there is little doubt that he accomplished his childhood goal.Born in 1924, Rehnquist, the son of a paper salesman and a mother who was a professional translator, grew up in a Milwaukee suburb during the Great Depression. His household was staunchly conservative, with Republican figures like Herbert Hoover among the family’s political heroes. After high school, Rehnquist served as a weather observer in North Africa during World War II and then attended Stanford under the GI Bill, where he graduated in 1948 with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science. Rehnquist then received a master’s degree in government from Harvard in 1950, after which he returned to Stanford and graduated first in his law school class in 1952 – just two places ahead of his classmate Sandra Day O’Connor, who would later join him on the court (and who Rehnquist had once dated and proposed to, although this wouldn’t become public until 2018).Rehnquist then clerked for Justice Robert Jackson (although, after his interview, Rehnquist thought Jackson had “written [him] off as a total loss”). Following this, Rehnquist moved to Phoenix (a city he reportedly chose for its “meteorological and political” climate) and spent 16 years in private practice while becoming involved in Republican politics, including speechwriting for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. That eventually brought him to the Nixon administration’s Justice Department in 1969 as assistant attorney general. Nixon, who called him “Renchberg” in the Watergate tapes, nominated him to the court as an associate justice in 1971, and the Senate confirmed him 68–26. Rehnquist was sworn in on Jan. 7, 1972.On the court, Rehnquist relied on three “related constitutional ideas”: “strict construction” of the Constitution’s text, judicial deference to Congress on questions of policy (meaning judges should not invalidate laws simply because they seemed unwise), and a robust defense of states’ rights against what he saw as an excessive accumulation of federal power since the New Deal. Those convictions put him at great odds with most of his colleagues – in his first five terms he wrote 24 lone dissents (among 72 total), which earned him the nickname “the Lone Ranger.” (Rehnquist’s clerks would later present him with a Lone Ranger doll that remained on his office mantel for years.) By 1975, however, a more conservative court allowed him to write an increasing number of majority opinions, such as National League of Cities v. Usery, which invalidated a federal statute regulating the wages and hours of state government workers under the 10th Amendment.When Chief Justice Warren Burger retired and President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist as Burger’s successor in 1986, the confirmation fight was contentious. In particular, critics raised a memo Rehnquist had written as a law clerk urging that Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine not be overturned in Brown v. Board of Education, and pointed to racially restrictive covenants in the deeds to his homes. The Senate nevertheless confirmed him 65–33, and he was sworn in on the same day Antonin Scalia was unanimously confirmed to fill Rehnquist’s vacated associate justice seat.Responsible for the famous “hogs on ice” quotation (he said that the chief presides over eight “associates … as independent as hogs on ice. He may at most persuade or cajole them”), Rehnquist nevertheless continued the trend of an increasing rate of unanimous cases on a steadily more conservative court. Roberts, who clerked for Rehnquist in the 1980 term, said in his own confirmation hearings that in any given year’s biggest cases, the opinion assignments were “distributed very evenly among the nine justices … because the Chief made a priority of being fair.” To date, Rehnquist holds the highest authorship rate in “one-vote margin cases” – suggesting he was the chief justice “most able to command 5-4 majorities [and] author opinions while holding together coalitions in often the most consequential and coveted authorship decisions.”In terms of the cases themselves, Rehnquist is perhaps most remembered for his efforts to limit Congress’ power. In 1995’s United States v. Lopez, the chief justice wrote the majority opinion striking down the Gun-Free School Zones Act and applied the same logic five years later in United States v. Morrison to invalidate a provision of the Violence Against Women Act. Rehnquist also presided over President Bill Clinton’s 1999 Senate impeachment trial (at the time, one of only two chief justices in history to perform that duty, the other being Salmon P. Chase). And a year later, Rehnquist joined the court’s per curiam decision in Bush v. Gore, stopping Florida’s recount in a 5-4 decision that effectively allowed the election to be certified for George W. Bush. (Rehnquist also authored a concurring opinion arguing that Florida’s highest court had violated Article II: “[T]here are a few exceptional cases in which the Constitution imposes a duty or confers a power on a particular branch of a State’s government. This is one of them.”)The 16th chief justice was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in October 2004, and continued to work until his death in 2005, just shy of his 81st birthday. According to his colleagues (who proved significantly more complimentary toward him than toward Burger), he “steered the Court along a path of responsibility and careful analysis throughout his 19 years as Chief Justice … and he was able to secure the cooperation and admiration of all of the Justices for the years in which he served” (Sandra Day O’Connor), “was a good man who epitomized fairness, dignity, and strength of character” (Clarence Thomas), and “was the fairest, most efficient boss I have ever had.” (Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Thirteen years later, Justice Brett Kavanaugh lauded Rehnquist as his “first judicial hero” who “brought about a massive change in constitutional law and how we think about the Constitution.”SCOTUS QuoteCHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “More generally, is there anything that your friend said that you disagree with?”MR. PIPOLY: “No, Justice – Chief Justice – Mr. Chief Justice. My apologies.”CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “Whatever.”— Mullin v. Doe (2026)Read more