Registration is now open for The SCOTUSblog Summit: 2026 Term Preview, which will take place on Wednesday, Sept. 16, in Washington, D.C. Programming will include a keynote address featuring Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA); a live taping of the Advisory Opinions podcast; a fireside chat with Cooley partner Elizabeth Prelogar; and a panel featuring Brett Gerry (Boeing’s chief legal officer), Brian Callanan (TD Bank’s general counsel), and Jeff Taylor (ExxonMobil’s general counsel). Use this registration link to request a spot at this exciting event.
At the Court
On Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary order, known as an administrative stay, allowing construction on the new White House ballroom to continue for now. The court could release its decision in the interim docket case at any time.
Morning Reads
Louisiana teacher asks Supreme Court to stop Ten Commandments displays in classrooms
Piper Hutchinson, Louisiana Illuminator
Last week, Texas families asked the court to weigh in on the constitutionality of a 2025 Texas law that requires each classroom in that state to display a copy of the Ten Commandments. On Tuesday, a Louisiana teacher filed a related petition for review, urging the justices “to hear his constitutional challenge to a state law that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in K-12 and college classrooms” in Louisiana, according to the Louisiana Illuminator. “I have spent over 16 years teaching my students that the Constitution protects every one of them – every faith, and no faith,” said the teacher, Chris Dier, about the new petition. “I respect the Ten Commandments and the place religion holds in millions of Americans’ lives, undoubtedly. But the state cannot turn my classroom into a place to deliver its own religious message or make me the messenger who delivers it.”
As Supreme Court’s Trump ‘Emergencies’ Return, Debate Simmers Over How Much to Say
Ann E. Marimow, The New York Times (paywalled)
The Supreme Court’s Monday order allowing “President Trump to continue pursuing proposed restrictions on voting by mail” was 10 pages long. In that sense, it “marked a departure from how the court had routinely handled emergency requests during the early months of Mr. Trump’s second term,” namely, with brief orders including “little or no explanation of its reasoning,” according to The New York Times. The explanation included in Monday’s order and other recent decisions “shows how the court is adapting to the pace of the Trump era. It also suggests that the justices, who pride themselves in operating above the political fray, appear to have taken notice of complaints from the public, members of Congress and their own judicial colleagues about unexplained, consequential orders.”
Supreme Court voting rights ruling shakes up Georgia redistricting fight
Megan Butler, Courthouse News Service
On Tuesday, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit “remanded the redistricting fight over Georgia’s congressional maps to a lower court … to review in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling that limited the Voting Rights Act,” according to Courthouse News Service. “The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais strictly limited how redistricting maps can remedy racial discrimination. It held Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district should not have been created based on race and was therefore an unconstitutional gerrymander.” At an earlier point in the Georgia case, “a judge ordered the creation of two new majority-Black Senate districts and three additional majority-Black House districts to remedy vote dilution in the metro Atlanta area.”
Man Accused of Impersonating Chief Justice Roberts, NSA Agent
Jordan Fischer, Bloomberg Law
On Friday, Joshua M. Culver was arrested “on federal charges alleging he impersonated Chief Justice John Roberts in an attempt to have an Indiana criminal case dismissed,” according to Bloomberg Law. “An indictment returned in July in the US District Court for the Northern District of Indiana alleges Culver forged Roberts’ signature on a letter to a Grant County court purporting to order” the dismissal. He “also allegedly impersonated a National Security Agency employee in an attempt to obtain law enforcement records on a family member and to convince a Lake County court to dismiss a separate case in which he is accused of threatening a judge.”
Judge rejects Ghislaine Maxwell's effort to overturn sex-trafficking conviction and sentence
Melissa Quinn and Jacob Rosen, CBS News
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer “rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s effort to toss out her 2021 conviction on sex-trafficking charges and 20-year prison sentence,” according to CBS News. The judge wrote that Maxwell, a longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate, had “failed to make a substantial showing that her constitutional rights were denied,” describing her claims as “meritless” and “frivolous.” Before Tuesday, “Maxwell had already lost an earlier attempt to overturn her conviction and prison sentence. Last fall, the Supreme Court turned away Maxwell’s appeal, … leaving her conviction and sentence intact.”
On Site
Court News
Trump administration asks justices to consider key border policy
The Trump administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to review a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that bars the federal government from removing immigrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally without giving them a chance to seek asylum. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that the decision “threatens to dismantle” what Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “describes as an ‘indispensable’ tool for controlling the border.”
Contributor Corner
Gutting the Alien Tort Statute
In his Courtly Observations column, Erwin Chemerinsky revisited Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I, in which the court limited the ability of foreigners to bring lawsuits under the Alien Tort Statute for violations of international law. Chemerinsky described the ruling as “a lethal blow” to ATS suits.
SCOTUS Outside Opinions
The justices should regularly sit on the lower courts
For his series on what the Supreme Court can do better, Josh Blackman wrote about why he believes the justices should regularly preside over en banc oral arguments before the circuit court they oversee and take part in district court proceedings. “The justices should hone their craft and get a better sense of how litigation operates,” Blackman wrote.
Podcasts
Advisory Opinions
Civility vs. Collegiality | Interview: Judges Tom Griffith and David Tatel
Sarah Isgur and David French invite former D.C. Circuit judges Tom Griffith and David Tatel on the podcast to discuss relationships, judicial independence, and what it means to be a “former” judge. But first, bar complaints and the White House ballroom injunction.
Ask Amy
Q: How does the Supreme Court deal with capital cases?
A: There are currently 10 executions – five in Texas, two each in Florida and Tennessee, and one in Alabama – scheduled to take place between now and the end of the year. In at least some of those cases, litigation stemming from or related to the execution will likely come to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture, either because an inmate is seeking to put his (or in one case, her) execution on hold or because the state is seeking to clear the way for the execution to take place.
But the case will be on the Supreme Court’s radar well before the emergency application actually arrives there. A lawyer at the Supreme Court who is responsible for managing emergency appeals – known colloquially as the “death clerk” because (at least at one time) so much of that job’s workload involved capital cases – closely tracks upcoming executions and related litigation as it makes its way through the system.
Once an emergency application is filed with the justices, things can move quickly, especially if the execution is scheduled to take place in only a few days or even hours. The litigant opposing the appeal files a brief outlining its arguments, and then the litigant who filed the appeal has the chance to file a reply.
After that, the ball is in the justices’ court. As Kelsey explained in a story for SCOTUSblog earlier this summer, inmates seeking the Supreme Court’s intervention to stave off executions face an uphill battle: the justices have not put an execution on hold in more than two years and have “denied more than 75 such requests since then, typically” without any justices publicly dissenting.
SCOTUS Quote
JUSTICE KAGAN: “I'm just asking you to assume with me for a moment that there is a categorical exception and to tell me who you think counts as a minister, and why the woman in this case does not.”
MR. DELLINGER: “Well, in our view, if that was the test, then we would say that the court of appeals was correct in holding that she was not a minister, and the reason – the principal reason is she carries out such important secular functions in addition to her religious duties in –”
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “That can't – I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that can't be the test. The Pope is a head of state carrying out secular functions; right?”
— Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC (2011)