After completing a term of imprisonment, federal criminal defendants often serve terms of supervised release that usually last between one to five years, depending on the offense for which they were convicted. Isabel Rico pleaded guilty to federal drug trafficking offenses and was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment followed by four years of supervised release. Rico violated her terms of supervised release several times, including near the end of her term of supervision. She stopped reporting to her probation officer, stopped living at the address she gave her probation officer, and absconded. After her term of supervision expired and while she was a fugitive, she also committed new crimes.

Yesterday brought the justices another of the term’s cases about the federal statute forcing the enforcement of arbitration agreements. The issue in this one – Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock – is the scope of an exemption in the Federal Arbitration Act for interstate transportation workers. Specifically, the question is whether that exemption reaches “last-mile” drivers who don’t themselves cross state lines, even though the goods they are delivering are on an interstate journey. As far as you could tell from the argument, the justices seem inclined to give those workers the benefit of the exemption – that is, they may choose to go to court instead of being forced to arbitrate with their employers.

Next week’s argument in Jules v Andre Balazs Properties considers a technical question about the jurisdiction of federal courts to enforce an arbitration award. It is the immediate successor of a case from 2022, Badgerow v Walters, which held that federal courts do not have jurisdiction based on the Federal Arbitration Act to grant that relief. The question here is whether a federal court that has a pending case over which it had jurisdiction to compel arbitration can use that jurisdiction to entertain a motion to confirm the arbitration award.

Yesterday’s argument in Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction displayed a bench almost uniformly skeptical of a lower court’s absolute standard for responding to the failure of a debtor in bankruptcy to mention one of its assets to that court.

We were live as the court released its opinions in Rico v. United States and Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment.