A Note To Readers: 6/28/07

Monday was a remarkable day at the Supreme Court, but with the hotly anticipated school cases expected to draw the Court’s October Term 2006 to a dramatic conclusion, today promises to be even more momentous. We wanted to share with you our plan for bringing you all the action, in as close to real-time as possible.

As we did on Monday morning, Lyle and I will coordinate to give you both a minute-by-minute update of what is happening at the Court in our “LiveBlog” beginning at 10 AM Eastern Time, as well as Lyle’s post below that quickly fleshing out additional details (that post is above this one, and a direct link is here). Because it’s common practice for the Chief Justice to announce opinions that he authored after the opinions of any other Justices who have opinions that day, if – as is widely expected – the Chief is the author of the school cases, we likely won’t have any information about them until approximately 10:15 or 10:20. You will be able to follow that action in both the LiveBlog post and in Lyle’s post immediately below it, though we kindly ask that you refresh no more often than roughly once a minute to minimize the load on our servers. We’ve also disabled commenting site-wide until the initial rush is over, also in order to minimize our load.

In addition, we will make every effort to post the opinions as soon as possible (note, however, that they often are not released until any reading from the bench concludes). To lighten the burden on our servers, we plan to host the opinions off the main SCOTUSblog site at the following addresses, which will also be linked to at scotusblog.wordpress.com: Here for the Seattle schools case, here for the Jefferson County case (those two addresses will point to the same opinion if there is only one), here for the Panetti case, and here for Leegin Creative. Those links will initially feature versions taken from an online database, but we will smoothly transition over to the nicer, officially paginated Bench Opinions as soon as we get those (typically a few minutes after the Court recesses).

Finally today, after the direct action for the Court finishes, we’ll release a sort of “Super StatPack” with all sorts of end-of-Term statistics. We’ll also have a discussion board going throughout the day today and tomorrow about the schools cases, commentary on tomorrow’s two other decisions, and additional statistical analyses being posted regularly over the next week or so.

The next few days promise to be incredibly exciting, so check back here often.