SCOTUStoday for Thursday, March 19

The court has indicated that it may announce opinions tomorrow at 10 a.m. EDT. We will be live blogging beginning at 9:30.

Also on Friday, the justices will meet in a private conference to discuss cases and vote on petitions for review. Orders from that conference are expected on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT.

The Supreme Court’s Monday announcement that it will hear argument on the Trump administration’s efforts to remove protected immigration status from Haitians and Syrians and leave those protections in place for now felt to some like an acknowledgement of pushback the justices have faced for quickly siding with the administration in most emergency requests in the past year and only rarely explaining why. The justices “have faced mounting public pressure to slow down and show their work – even if they ultimately rule for the administration,” according to Bloomberg. “We hope this is the beginning of the end of what has become this court’s routine acceptance of the government’s purported ‘emergency’ requests,” said J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, to Bloomberg.

In the weeks since the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s global tariffs on Feb. 20, the Trump administration has been working to reimpose them under different laws. But new tariffs have sparked new legal battles, including lawsuits in the Court of International Trade over whether the administration is correctly applying Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which authorizes the president to impose temporary tariffs of up to 15% in response to “large and serious balance-of-payments deficit[s],” according to Politico. “While Trump called his new approach ‘time tested,’ that authority has never been invoked before and the high court has not given its blessing to Trump using that specific law in the current circumstances.” “The Court of International Trade has set arguments on the pending suits, including a request for a preliminary injunction, for April 10.”

As the Supreme Court considers the legality of state laws barring transgender athletes from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams, which are in place in almost 30 states, additional states are debating implementing such laws. “Maine and Colorado this week approved ballot initiatives by advocacy groups seeking to ban transgender student-athletes from playing on girls’ sports team,” according to The Washington Post. “Voters in Washington state will also vote on trans athletes in November, and similar measures have been proposed in Arizona, Nevada and Nebraska.”

In Slate’s Executive Dysfunction newsletter, Smita Ghosh explored a 19th -century New York case on inheritance, Lynch v. Clarke, that she believes may play an “instrumental” role in the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case. “In the 1844 case, Judge Lewis Sandford [of the New York Court of Chancery] held that Julia Lynch, the child of Irish parents who was born during their ‘temporary sojourn’ in New York, was a U.S. citizen,” Ghosh wrote, adding that “Lynch sheds light on the meaning of the 14^th Amendment’s citizenship clause because it represents the state of the law before the amendment was ratified, and the clause, according to its Framers, was ratified to confirm—not change—this aspect of existing law.”