I’ve never been a fan of the lottery. 

In fourth grade, I pooled together my chore money (a grand total of $6), handed it over to my dad, and started coming up with names for the horse I’d buy with my winnings. Of course (and thankfully for my parents, who had no interest in caring for a 900-lb horse in addition to two kids), this didn’t work out. I later learned about my dismal odds from a National Geographic Kids magazine: I was thousands of times more likely to be struck by lightning than win the Powerball. 

So, naturally, I was skeptical when Zach, SCOTUSblog’s executive editor, asked me to enter into and write a story on the Supreme Court’s lottery system, which allows members of the public to apply online to receive tickets to oral argument. After all was said and done, I expected to write up a few paragraphs effectively saying that I gave it a go, got denied, and that was that. Thirty-three days after entering my name into the Supreme Court’s surprisingly easy-to-use online lottery system, however, I was walking from the metro at Union Station to the Supreme Court for my first live oral argument. Like the lottery system, it also turned out a bit differently from what I was expecting. 

Civil Rights and Wrongs is a recurring series by Daniel Harawa covering criminal justice and civil rights cases before the court.

Please note that the views of outside contributors do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff.

In a recent investigative report, New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor revealed that there is growing friction among the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices. Specifically, her article describes a widening rift over how the liberal justices believe they should operate on a 6-3 conservative court. As Kantor tells it, Justice Elena Kagan favors restraint and internal diplomacy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on the other hand, has embraced sharper dissents and public-facing critiques of the court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor sits between them, balancing alarm with a commitment to maintaining working relationships with her conservative colleagues. With this term shaping up to be yet another consequential one for our foundational understanding of democracy, constitutional structure, and civil rights, Kantor’s reporting paints a picture of the liberal justices at odds over how best to use their voices in a moment defined by dissent.

The court will hear its big copyright case for the year during the first week of the December session, when on Monday, Dec. 1, it reviews a billion-dollar ruling against Cox Communications based on its failure to eradicate copyright infringement by its customers.

On Monday, Dec. 1, in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, the Supreme Court will consider the federal judiciary’s role in asylum cases as it weighs whether a federal court of appeals must defer to the Board of Immigration Appeals’ judgment on an asylum seeker’s claims of persecution when it reviews the individual’s case. 

The Supreme Court on Monday morning sent the case of a Mississippi man convicted of abusing his daughter back to the state courts for another look. It also reversed, without briefing on the merits or oral argument, a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of a Maryland man convicted of second-degree murder. The brief, unsigned opinions in Pitts v. Mississippi and Clark v. Sweeney came as part of a list of orders from the justices’ private conference on Friday, Nov. 21.