SCOTUStoday for Friday, October 3

What will you do with your one remaining wild and precious weekend before the Supreme Court is back in session? Hopefully your plans involve catching up on SCOTUSblog’s case previews.

Morning Reads

• President Trump’s winning streak at the Supreme Court is about to get tested (Maureen Groppe, USA Today) — As you’re likely aware, the Trump administration has found much success on the Supreme Court’s interim docket, where the justices have put a variety of lower court orders on hold as litigation continues. But the administration’s win streak could end now that some of its policies and firings will be heard by the court on the merits, according to USA Today. “The big theme [of the 2025-26 term] will be the showdown between the Supreme Court and the president, or the absence of a showdown between the Supreme Court and the president,” said Samuel Bray, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, to USA Today.
• New Marquette Law School Poll National Survey Finds Continuing Large Majority Who Say A President Must Obey The Supreme Court (Kevin Conway, Marquette University) — Just 16% of the American public “say the president has the power to ignore a Court ruling,” but more than half “believe the Court is going out of its way to avoid making a ruling that President Donald Trump might refuse to obey,” according to a new poll from Marquette Law School. Responses to the first question were pretty consistent across partisan divides, but Democrats were 50 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say the court is “going out of its way” to side with Trump. Marquette also asked about upcoming cases, how the court is handling its job (50% approved and 50% disapproved), and support for Chief Justice John Roberts (viewed favorably by 17%, unfavorably by 28%, and 55% stated that they were unfamiliar with him).
• The Supreme Court case that could supercharge election litigation (Kelsey Reichmann, Courthouse News Service) — An upcoming Supreme Court case on mail-in ballots, Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, could spawn many more lawsuits over the 2026 midterm elections, according to Courthouse News Service. “If [the justices] say that these people can challenge the way that states accept mail-in ballots, it’s going to supercharge, I think, misinformation and disinformation around electoral outcomes in the midterms, and it’s going to allow a flood of challenges by people who lose in what are otherwise standard electoral processes that have been in place for decades,” said Devon Ombres, senior director of courts and legal policy at the Center for American Progress.
• Tribal Member Asks Supreme Court to Review Oklahoma Tax Ruling (Perry Cooper, Bloomberg Tax) — A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on her tax dispute with the state of Oklahoma and hold that the state can’t tax “the 200,000 tribal members on five eastern Oklahoma reservations,” according to Bloomberg Tax. The Oklahoma Supreme Court sided with state officials in the case by refusing to “extend the US Supreme Court’s 2020 holding in McGirt v. Oklahoma—that the tribe’s reservation is Indian country—to bar the state from imposing income tax on those living and working there.”
• The Supreme Court sees the importance of Fed independence (The Washington Post Editorial Board) — The court’s decision on Wednesday to allow Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to remain in office for now is “a welcome signal that the court sees the central bank as uniquely independent compared with executive branch agencies,” according to The Washington Post Editorial Board. The board argued that the Fed “must be free to make difficult but unpopular decisions to prevent the economy from overheating, which leads to rising prices.”

SCOTUS Quick Hits

• The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it will hear arguments in January on Trump’s request to be able to remove Lisa Cook from her position as a Federal Reserve governor. Cook will remain in office for now.
• Monday is the first day of the 2025-26 term. On Wednesday, we began publishing our previews of cases to be argued next week, and more are coming today.
• A list of the cases that the justices granted during their “long conference” on Sept. 29 is expected to be released soon. The list of denied petitions is expected on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT.

A Closer Look: The Justices’ Book Deals

In what The Hill has deemed “book tour-palooza,” much of the bench is offering, or plans to offer, insights into their lives and the law. Seven of the nine sitting justices (everyone except Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan) have authored books or currently have book deals, and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor have all recently appeared at book tour events. Former Justice Anthony Kennedy is also set to kick off a book tour later this month. 

Justices authoring books is nothing new. In 2012, SCOTUSblog’s own Ronald Collins listed 353 works written or edited by Supreme Court justices, from John Jay to Sandra Day O’Connor.

As for those on the court today, in 2007, Justice Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving current justice, wrote about his rural Georgia upbringing in his 2007 autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.” Originally called “From Pin Point to Points After,” the book details Thomas’ path from poverty to the highest court. 

Chronicling her (Bronx) roots, Sotomayor wrote “My Beloved World” in 2013 before turning to children’s books, such as “Turning Pages: My Life Story,” “The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor,” “Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You,” “Just Help! How to Build a Better World,” and most recently, “Just Shine!,” which came out in September. Jackson released “Lovely One” in 2024, the title of which stems from the meaning of her first and middle names, Ketanji Onyika.

Justice Neil Gorsuch released his “A Republic, If You Can Keep It” in 2019 and co-authored “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law” with his former clerk Janie Nitze in 2024. Barrett’s “Listening to the Law” was published this September, which she spoke about at the inaugural SCOTUSblog Summit on Sept. 25.

Justices’ annual financial disclosures, which are filed each year in mid-May and released in June, provide details on the payment side of book deals. For 2024, disclosed in June 2025, Jackson received roughly $2 million in book advances from Penguin Random House for “Lovely One,” after a previously reported 2023 advance of over $890,000. Gorsuch received $250,000 in royalty income in 2024 from HarperCollins, which published “Over Ruled.” Sotomayor reported nearly $133,000 in royalties and advances from Penguin Random House in the same year. Thomas received a $1.5 million advance from HarperCollins for his memoir, and Barrett obtained an advance of $2 million. Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh have more recently signed book deals, according to CNN and The New York Times.

With the end of the court’s summer recess, the books and book tours will likely fall on the back burner, but will remain consequential as justice-authored works.

On Site

Case Previews

Amy Howe on Chiles v. Salazar

On Tuesday, the court will consider a challenge to Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy” – treatment intended to change a client’s sexual orientation or gender identity – for young people, weighing whether it interferes with counselors’ right to free speech. Colorado contends “that the ban merely regulates the treatments that mental health professionals can provide because conversion therapy has been found to be ‘unsafe and ineffective,'” as noted by Amy in her case preview.

Richard Cooke on Barrett v. United States

Also on Tuesday, the court will consider how to apply double jeopardy principles to a federal firearm offense. In his case preview for SCOTUSblog, Richard Cooke, who worked in the U.S. Department of Justice for 23 years, noted that the court’s eventual ruling in Barrett v. United States will build on “a test for deciding when multiple punishments may be imposed for a single criminal event” established nearly a century ago.

Contributor Corner

In his latest Major Questions column, Adam White, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrestled with the court’s decision to hear arguments in Trump v. Slaughter and reconsider Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, “a landmark precedent allowing Congress to insulate certain agency heads against full presidential control.”

Will Humphrey’s Executor be overturned? So far, that has been the conventional narrative around the Slaughter case. But the situation is much more nuanced, because Humphrey’s Executor itself was more nuanced. To be sure, the court does seem likely to uphold President Donald Trump’s firing of FTC commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. But this would not require the court to overturn Humphrey. Rather, Humphrey’s own analysis might spell doom for the FTC’s independence, for reasons that the court has signaled in several opinions over the last decade.