Courtly Observations is a recurring series by Erwin Chemerinsky that focuses on what the Supreme Court’s decisions will mean for the law, for lawyers and lower courts, and for people’s lives.

The Supreme Court’s recent rulings allowing Texas and California to engage in mid-decade gerrymandering of congressional districts show the urgent need for reconsideration of Rucho v. Common Cause, where the justices held that federal courts cannot hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering. After the court in December upheld the Texas legislature’s gerrymandering, intended to benefit Republicans, it did the “right” thing on Feb. 4 in dismissing the challenge to California’s gerrymandering which was to benefit Democrats. But by allowing unchecked partisan gerrymandering, the court is encouraging ever more extreme efforts and undermining democracy.

Empirical SCOTUS is a recurring series by Adam Feldman that looks at Supreme Court data, primarily in the form of opinions and oral arguments, to provide insights into the justices’ decision making and what we can expect from the court in the future.

It’s no secret that all three of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees – consisting of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – are judicial conservatives. This does not mean, of course, that all three vote for a conservative outcome in each case before them. Indeed, for much of the last decade, certain Supreme Court commentary has revolved around which of these conservative justices has been most likely to side with the court’s liberal bloc (consisting of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and formerly Justice Stephen Breyer) in a given case. Each term seems to produce a new candidate, often prompted by a single, high-profile decision that defies ideological expectations.

Updated on Feb. 12 at 11:15 a.m.

For decades, the U.S. solicitor general’s most familiar role at the certiorari stage has been reactive rather than proactive: When the Supreme Court wants the federal government’s views on a certiorari petition in a case in which the United States is not a party, it usually has to ask for them – through a call for the views of the solicitor general, or CVSG. That process began in 1957 and became institutionalized in the 1960s. CVSGs are unusual but not rare, happening around 10 or 11 times every term, and they serve as powerful signals that a petition has attracted the court’s serious attention.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued a one-sentence order that cleared the way for California to use a new congressional map intended to add five Democratic seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The California map was a response to Texas’ adoption of a new map that created five House seats favorable to Republicans. The justices in December had allowed Texas to use its new map.

Both cases came to the court on its “interim” docket, so that the court’s rulings merely granted or denied requests for preliminary relief while the challenges to the map continue. But both cases also illustrate an important, and often underappreciated, aspect of this docket: even if the rulings are theoretically only temporary, they can have lasting, if not permanent, consequences. The following is not exhaustive, but I explore below some other cases that, although on the interim docket, have had such effects.

ScotusCrim is a recurring series by Rory Little focusing on intersections between the Supreme Court and criminal law.

Imagine: A group of drug dealers beat and shoot dead a citizen they felt was interfering with their work. There are witnesses as well as video evidence establishing these facts and enabling identifications. The gang is in constant electronic communication with their bosses who are miles away in a plush office. With the bosses’ knowledge and approval, the drug dealers do a hurried clean-up of the scene and spirit away the shooters and physical evidence before law enforcement can investigate.