SCOTUStoday for Monday, September 22

Welcome to SCOTUStoday, an expanded newsletter from SCOTUSblog that will deliver the most important information on the Supreme Court right to your inbox. In addition to the “Morning Reads” that you’re used to, SCOTUStoday offers “SCOTUS Quick Hits,” detailing the latest happenings on the court; “A Closer Look,” a short feature piece on one particularly salient aspect of the court’s work; and “On Site,” an overview of the most popular and influential articles on SCOTUSblog.

As before, please send any questions or comments to [email protected]. We are thrilled to have you join us for this new phase of SCOTUSblog.

Morning Reads

• Man who tried to assassinate Kavanaugh in 2022 wanted to kill 3 justices, prosecutors say (Scott MacFarlane and Melissa Quinn, CBS News) — In a sentencing memorandum filed on Friday, federal prosecutors said that Nicholas Roske, the “California man who pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022,” planned to kill three justices “in an effort to ‘single-handedly alter the constitutional order for ideological ends,'” according to CBS News. Prosecutors said they uncovered Discord messages from Roske about his plan to “remove some people from the supreme court” in order to prevent the conservative majority from overturning Roe v. Wade. “Prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Roske to at least 30 years to life in prison, arguing that his conduct is an affront to the Constitution and required ‘extensive premeditation.'”
• Justice Alito, in Rome, Says Religious Liberty is Under Siege (Motoko Rich and Abbie VanSickle, The New York Times) — Justice Samuel Alito spoke in Rome on Saturday about rising threats to religious freedom, not just in the United States, but around the world. “It is a great matter of concern and something that I think all Christians should be concerned about and should try to find ways of combating this problem,” Alito said during an event cosponsored by the United States Embassy to the Holy See, the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, according to The New York Times. Alito, who briefly met with Pope Leo XIV during his visit to Rome, also reflected on the relationship between his work on the court and his Catholic faith. “I think reason is a hallmark of the Catholic intellectual tradition,” he said.
• Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reflects on challenges, kindness at UVA (Jane Kelly, UVA Today) — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her Harvard Law School roommate Kimberly Jenkins Robinson at the University of Virginia on Thursday to speak about her journey to the Supreme Court and how her parents taught her to embrace academic opportunities without looking down on others who didn’t have the same opportunities. Her own grandmother didn’t know how to spell, but she modeled “generosity of spirit and consideration of others … before our family with every breath of her hard, beautiful life,” Jackson said, according to UVA Today. Students in the crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to Jackson at the end of the event; she turned 55 on Sept. 14.
• Texas governor signs bill cracking down on mail-order abortion pills (Steve Gorman, Reuters) — When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, it sparked changes to state-level abortion restrictions nationwide, and laws continue to evolve to this day, according to Reuters. Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that empowers “private citizens to sue individuals and companies for shipping” abortion medications into Texas. “Women who take the abortion pills are expressly exempt from liability under the measure. There are also exceptions for the use of mifepristone and misoprostol in medically necessary procedures related to miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.”
• The End of Equity (Duncan Hosie, The New York Review of Books) — In a column for The New York Review of Books, legal scholar Duncan Hosie criticized the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow federal officers to more freely make immigration stops in the Los Angeles area, contending that in it and other recent cases the justices have “closed their institution’s doors to certain groups of petitioners, especially prisoners and the poor, even when they allege grave and often irreversible constitutional violations.” “In cases like Vasquez Perdomo, the Court is doing nothing less than remaking the legal system itself—reshaping the law of remedies to concentrate power at the top,” Hosie wrote.

SCOTUS Quick Hits

• On Friday, the Trump administration urged the court to prevent transgender people from choosing the sex markers on their passports.
• Also on Friday, the administration asked the court for a second time to allow it to end protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States.
• Amicus curiae, or friend of the court, briefs in support of the Trump administration or in support of neither party are due tomorrow in the cases on President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
• A response brief to the Trump administration’s emergency application asking the court to allow for the firing of Fed governor Lisa Cook is due on Thursday.

A Closer Look: The Long Conference

Next Monday, Sept. 29, the justices will gather for their annual “long conference” and consider cert petitions that built up during the court’s summer recess. There are typically around 2,000 cases assigned to the meeting each year. 

I know what you’re thinking: that’s too many petitions for a single conference, even if it’s a long one. How do the justices address so many filings in a day?

The answer is, as Amy Howe pointed out in a SCOTUSblog post this summer, that the justices won’t consider every petition during the Sept. 29 meeting. They have their law clerks screen the full list ahead of the long conference and then use the clerks’ insights to create a “discuss” list, which guides the actual meeting. “Any justice can ask to have a case included on the discuss list; if a case does not make the list, it is automatically denied without the justices ever voting on it,” Amy explained.

Cases that make it to the discuss list have a chance to be heard by the court, but it’s a small one. In recent years, the justices have granted just five to 15 of the cases they considered during the long conference. We should hear which cases made the cut this year sometime in the next few days.

On Site

From Amy Howe

Trump Administration’s Tariffs Brief

Just 10 days after the Supreme Court agreed to take up and fast-track challenges to Trump’s power to impose sweeping tariffs, the Trump administration filed its opening brief on the merits. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the government’s top lawyer before the court, told the justices that “the President and his Cabinet officials have determined that the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented economic prosperity, and that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe.” Read Amy’s full analysis here.

Passports for Transgender Individuals

In a new emergency application filed on Friday, the Trump administration asked the justices to temporarily pause a ruling by a federal judge in Massachusetts that would require the State Department to provide transgender and nonbinary people with passports reflecting the sex designation of their choosing. According to U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the order “injures the United States by compelling it to speak to foreign governments in contravention of both the President’s foreign policy and scientific reality.” Read Amy’s full analysis here.

Contributor Corner

In his latest Rights and Responsibilities column, Richard Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and former clerk for former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writes about the challenge of defining “religion.”

The Constitution itself does not provide a definition of “religion.” And more than a few forests have been felled by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, theologians, and law professors trying to find or construct one. This year, the Supreme Court also ventured into the definitional fire swamp, in a case called Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission. The decision was unanimous, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the questions raised – or, for that matter, the questions avoided – are easy ones.

You can access the rest of the piece here.