The Seventh Amendment guarantees a right to a jury trial in “suits at common law” – that is, lawsuits seeking legal remedies, such as money, rather than a remedy (known as equitable relief) that orders a defendant to do something or to stop doing something – in which $20 or more is at stake. In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in SEC v. Jarkesy that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s imposition of fines in its administrative proceedings as a penalty for securities fraud violated that guarantee. On Tuesday, April 21, the justices will consider whether that same reasoning applies to fines that the Federal Communications Commission imposes for violations of federal communications laws.

Please note that the following does not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog.

The Supreme Court is losing legitimacy – the only superpower it has. It’s under attack from partisan critics and presidents who don’t want their power challenged.

Yet the court isn’t perfect. Does the institution need to change to catch up to the modern era of our politics, or are its anachronistic rituals the only thing keeping it from becoming another failed branch? How do we preserve the last branch standing?

After walking through the current court and the history of how we got here, these are a few of the ideas I propose at the end of my book, Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court.

The Second Amendment states that “[a] well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” As both critics and supporters of the amendment recognize, little of that language is particularly straightforward. What is a “well regulated Militia,” and how does that apply to today’s arguments over gun control? What constitutes “Arms,” and when is keeping and bearing them “infringed”?

Amid that morass, one phrase that would seem (at least on the surface) a good deal more intuitive is “the people.” After all, doesn’t the people consist of, well, everyone? The answer is … not exactly. So who exactly are “the people” that may possess firearms in the first place? And how might this play into the court’s future decisions on the Second Amendment?

One of the more frequent questions we get here at SCOTUSblog is how the court decides which cases to review on the merits – that is, to have additional briefing and oral argument on, followed by a written opinion. Although this has been written about in SCOTUSblog before, we thought it might be useful to have a thorough refresher on the subject as the court picks what cases to hear next term.

The Supreme Court justice memoir, so lucrative for its authors, tends to be a less than illuminating genre. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s A Republic, If You Can Keep It reiterated the case for originalism and attempted to illustrate why he was a worthy successor to Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Listening to the Law recited high school civics lessons. And in Lovely One, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described her family history and life in detail.

The promise of a justice telling his or her life story is that it will help us further understand the jurisprudence of the person who is shaping the path of the law. But, truth be told, each of these books does little more than buff the public image of the judge presented at their hearings.     

Hence, the pleasant surprises in reading Justice Anthony Kennedy’s memoir, Life, Law & Liberty, published last fall and promoted by Kennedy in an interview this year. Unlike so many other judicial memoirs, the retired justice provides a revealing portrait of the person who wore the robe. Just as surprising is the revelation that Kennedy loves literature – which, in his words, not only “document[s] human experience but also” seeks “to edify it” – and gracefully incorporates literary references throughout the text.