Curious about how Supreme Court justices spend their spare time? Justice Sonia Sotomayor revealed on Tuesday that she likes reading … recent books from her colleagues. She “said she just finished reading Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s memoir and is in the middle of reading former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s.”
At the Court
On Monday, the court was asked on its interim relief docket to bar Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and the Franklin County Board of Elections from removing Sam Ronan, a candidate for Congress in the state’s 15th district, from Ohio’s Republican primary election ballot. LaRose and county election officials responded to that request yesterday. For more on the dispute, see the On Site section below.
The court will next hear arguments on Monday, April 20, the first day of its April sitting.
Morning Reads
Sotomayor Faults Kavanaugh Over Immigration Stops Concurrence
Jordan Fischer, Bloomberg Law
During a Tuesday appearance in Lawrence, Kansas, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized Justice Brett Kavanaugh, without naming him, “for failing to grasp the real-world effects of an unsigned order last year that allowed immigration enforcement sweeps in Los Angeles to resume,” according to Bloomberg Law. “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said, referencing Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Noem v. Perdomo. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” In his concurrence, Kavanaugh wrote “that legal residents’ encounters with immigration agents are ‘typically brief,’” failing to grasp, according to Sotomayor, that even short detentions can have major “financial consequences” for hourly workers.
U.S. Supreme Court justice warns of majority’s misuse of ‘shadow docket’ during Kansas talk
Anna Kaminski, Kansas Reflector
During that same event in Kansas, Sotomayor also reflected on the controversy surrounding the court’s “shadow docket,” and, specifically, the court’s multiple rulings on that docket in favor of the Trump administration. “There’s a lot of controversy over this process,” Sotomayor said, “because there’s a belief among some on my court – the majority – that whenever we stop the executive branch from doing something it wants to do, that’s irreparable harm to the government.” She continued, “There are others, like me, who believe that irreparable harm can happen to the people who are being affected.”
How often does the Supreme Court overturn its own decisions?
Mia Hennen, Pew Research Center
As the Supreme Court weighs “whether to overrule two of its own long-standing legal precedents – one about presidential power over federal agencies, which has been in place for over 90 years, and another about campaign financing by political parties,” Pew Research Center investigated how often the court actually overturns its own decisions. Using data from the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court Database at Pennsylvania State University, Pew found that, “[s]ince the Supreme Court’s founding in 1789 through its most recent full term in 2024, fewer than 1% of all rulings (236 of 29,202) have overturned an earlier high court decision.” “Overturning precedent hasn’t been very common in recent decades, either. Between the 2005 and 2024 terms, only 21 of 1,471 rulings (1.4%) overturned one or more earlier decisions.”
Plea deal reached for man charged with threatening to torture Supreme Court justices
Zach Schonfeld, The Hill
Panos Anastasiou, 77, “[a]n Alaska man charged with threatening to torture and assassinate six Supreme Court justices and some of their family members,” filed a notice on Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska that he has reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors, according to The Hill. Anastasiou has been accused “of submitting hundreds of messages to the Supreme Court online, many of which allegedly contained violent threats. Some were purportedly sent following the high court’s decision that then-former President Trump was entitled to broad criminal immunity.” Tuesday’s filing did not reveal the “details of the terms of his agreement with the government.”
Machine gun ban contested at 11th Circuit
Alex Pickett, Courthouse News Service
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit considered a Florida man’s effort to overturn his conviction for possessing a machine gun. The man contends that “he merely had a [machine gun] conversion device attached to an otherwise legal Glock handgun,” according to Courthouse News Service. “Assistant U.S. Attorney Justin Silverberg, representing the federal government, argued the appellate court only needs to look at the landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which found a ban on the possession of handguns unconstitutional but allowed for the prohibition of ‘dangerous and unusual’ firearms,” contending that the Florida man’s gun fits that category.
On Site
Interim Docket
State election dispute on political speech comes to Supreme Court on interim docket
Lawyers for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, as well as county election officials, urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday to let them go ahead with a ballot that does not include Sam Ronan, a candidate for Ohio’s 15th congressional district, for the state’s Republican primary on May 5.
From the SCOTUSblog Team
A Supreme Court status report
In early January, as the country eagerly awaited a tariffs ruling that – as it turned out – was still more than a month away, Supreme Court watchers raised concerns about the court’s pace for releasing opinions. Approximately three months later, are those concerns still justified?
Contributor Corner
Supreme Court summarily closes the courthouse doors again
In his Civil Rights and Wrongs column, Daniel Harawa reflected once more on “the Supreme Court’s troubling habit of summarily closing the courthouse doors on those with the least power in our legal system,” this time highlighting a qualified immunity ruling.
Podcasts
Amarica’s Constitution
New World, Same Constitution
Akhil Amar and Andy Lipka, who attended last week’s argument in the birthright citizenship case, share their initial reactions and then analyze what was said by the justices and advocates.
Johnson v. United States
Just over 13 years ago, the Supreme Court considered the use of a drug-detection dog on a front porch in Florida v. Jardines, holding that a porch should be considered “part of the home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes” and that, therefore, officers should have secured a warrant before bringing the dog to the scene. At their next private conference, the justices will consider a petition for review that applies that 2013 ruling to a multi-unit apartment building, contending that the area immediately outside an apartment door should be treated like a porch under the Fourth Amendment.
The case, Johnson v. United States, originated in 2019, when a Narcotics Task Force in Washington County, Maryland, brought a drug-detection dog to Apartment 201 at an apartment complex called Greenwich Place. The man who lived in that apartment, Eric Tyrell Johnson, was believed to be involved in a drug trafficking operation, and police officers were working “to confirm – or dispel – those suspicions before seeking a search warrant for” his apartment.
With the permission of building management, police officers brought the drug-detection dog to the area immediately outside Johnson’s apartment, which “was recessed from the common hallway by approximately three and a half feet.” The dog “alerted to the odor of illegal drugs in the area of the lower door seam,” and the police cited this alert in their successful application for a warrant to search Johnson’s home. “The search uncovered a heroin-fentanyl powder mixture, a handgun, ammunition, cell phones, cash, and other items indicative of drug-dealing.”
In the resulting trial, Johnson attempted to have this evidence suppressed “as fruit of a Fourth Amendment violation.” He argued that the warrantless dog sniff was out of line with two past Supreme Court rulings: the front porch case noted above and Kyllo v. United States, in which the court held that police cannot use specialized investigative tools like thermal-imaging devices to scan the inside of a home without a warrant. The district court, however, denied Johnson’s motion to suppress, and “Johnson was convicted of drug- and gun-related offenses.”
In August 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision, holding that “dog sniffs are different” than thermal-imaging devices because they point to the presence of illegal drugs in a home without “expos[ing] noncontraband items that otherwise would remain hidden from public view.” And the area outside of an apartment door is different than a front porch, the 4th Circuit continued, because it’s “part of a common hallway, used regularly by other building residents and by building cleaning staff.”
In his petition to the Supreme Court, Johnson emphasized that the 4th Circuit’s ruling deepened a split between lower courts over whether using a drug-detection dog at the door of an apartment is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. Decisions like the 4th Circuit’s are “wrongheaded” and “threaten[] to deprive Americans who live in multi-unit dwellings, or in homes that abut a stress, of their Fourth Amendment rights just because they don’t live in detached houses,” Johnson wrote, noting that “approximately a quarter of all Americans live in multi-unit dwellings.”
In its response brief, the federal government asked the court to leave the 4th Circuit’s ruling against Johnson in place, contending that it correctly held that the Supreme Court’s past rulings on dog sniffs and the Fourth Amendment did not establish that the sniffing outside of his apartment door required a warrant. In analyzing whether the area outside an apartment door is comparable to a front porch, lower courts consider case-specific details, such as who has access to the space, wrote U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer. What mattered in Johnson’s case, Sauer continued, wasn’t that he lived in an apartment rather than a house, but that his apartment door entered onto a busy hallway “serving numerous units” that “was frequented by other tenants, non-resident visitors, and the building’s cleaning staff.” Given this, the dog sniffs did “not infringe any legitimate privacy interest” protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Johnson v. United States is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time at their private conference on Friday, April 17.
SCOTUS Quote
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “Well, what if you stopped them on the street and said is a fish [a] record document or tangible object?”
MR. MARTINEZ: “I think if you – if you asked them that question and you – you pointed them to the fact that –”
JUSTICE SCALIA: “I don’t think you would get a polite answer to either of those questions.”
— Yates v. United States (2014)
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