Announcement of opinions for Tuesday, March 31

The Supreme Court on Friday morning announced that it will hear arguments on April 29 – the last day of the court’s April argument session, and the last day of regularly scheduled oral arguments – on the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Temporary Protected Status program for several thousand Syrians and roughly 350,000 Haitians currently living in the United States.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Tuesday in Pitchford v. Cain, the case of a Mississippi man who contends that he was sentenced to death in violation of the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection. Terry Pitchford asserts that such a constitutional violation “undermines the foundational promise of equal justice under law.” But Mississippi counters that this is not one of the “narrow circumstances” in which federal courts can grant state prisoners post-conviction relief.

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.

The president finds the long-settled meaning of the citizenship clause to be an intolerable obstacle to his agenda. The reason? Each year it would make U.S. citizens of tens of thousands of people who do not fit his racial and cultural ideal of what it means to be an “American.” So what does he do? His administration simply re-defines the citizenship clause to exclude those people – without seeking to amend the Constitution or even get the approval of Congress. What will the Supreme Court do about it?

But enough about the McKinley administration.

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.