Announcement of opinions for Wednesday, March 25

In a list of orders released on Monday morning, the Supreme Court reversed a ruling by a federal appeals court, holding that a Vermont police officer is entitled to qualified immunity from a lawsuit brought by a nonviolent protester who was injured during a sit-in at the state’s capitol. The justices also denied review in the case of a Texas man on death row seeking DNA testing that he says could prove his innocence. The court’s three Democratic appointees dissented in both cases. One of those justices, Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented from the denial of review in the case of a Texas journalist who was arrested, Sotomayor wrote, “for doing something journalists do every day: posing questions to a public official.”

 The justices did not act on several high-profile petitions for review that they have repeatedly considered at their private conferences, including petitions challenging state bans on assault rifles and large-capacity magazines, a Fourth Amendment case involving a police officer’s justification to stop a car, and the FBI’s efforts to invoke the state-secrets privilege.

“The text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed,” Justice Antonin Scalia famously insisted at page 22 of a notable book on legal interpretation. “Only the written word is the law,” Justice Neil Gorsuch has opined in a watershed opinion. “Fidelity to the law means fidelity to the text,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett has proclaimed in an important endowed lecture. “We’re all textualists now,” Justice Elena Kagan has observed in a famous exchange at Harvard Law School.

Nuts and Bolts is a recurring series by Stephen Wermiel providing insights into the mechanics of how the Supreme Court works.

Supreme Court watchers are accustomed to poring over the words and phrases written by the justices in their many decisions. Much less attention is paid to the bottom line.

In the Supreme Court there are two steps to the bottom line: the judgment and the mandate.

A unanimous court on Friday sided with a Mississippi street preacher who sued to block future enforcement of a public demonstration ordinance that he was previously convicted of violating. A lawsuit like his, “seeking purely prospective” – that is, a forward-facing – “remedy,” is not barred by Heck v. Humphrey, a 1994 ruling limiting the challenges convicted criminals can bring against the law under which they were convicted, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in Olivier v. City of Brandon, Mississippi.

Flowers Foods v. Brock brings the justices another in a lengthening line of cases about the exemptions from the Federal Arbitration Act. The specific question is whether “last-mile” drivers – drivers who deliver from a regional warehouse to the store – are exempt from the arbitration requirements of that statute.

The Supreme Court has decided numerous cases under the FAA in the last few decades, the great majority of them reversing lower court decisions that in the justices’ view gave inadequate breadth to the FAA’s command that courts faithfully enforce pre-dispute arbitration agreements. In recent years, though, an ancillary provision of that statute has brought the justices several cases on a different question – the breadth of the statute’s exemption for “transportation workers” who are “engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” The exemption is important because those workers cannot so readily be forced into arbitration when they have disputes with their employers.