Nuts and Bolts is a recurring series by Stephen Wermiel providing insights into the mechanics of how the Supreme Court works.

Every term in recent years, the Supreme Court has agreed to decide roughly 60 cases by receiving briefs, hearing arguments, and answering the questions posed in petitions by the parties.

But every so often, the justices decide to pose their own questions, sometimes in addition to and sometimes in place of the questions posed by the petitioner – that is, the litigant who lost in the lower court and sought Supreme Court review. At other times, the justices select which questions they will answer from among those posed by the petitioner.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared ready to side with police officers in Case v. Montana, a Montana man’s challenge to a 2021 incident that left him with a gunshot wound to the abdomen after police entered his home. The police officers say that they only went into the man’s home to help him, not because they believed that he was committing a crime. The question before the justices was how certain police officers must be that there is an emergency before, as in this case, going into a house without a warrant. After approximately 75 minutes of debate, the justices signaled that they were likely to give police officers more leeway in such situations, rather than adopting the more stringent standard that the Montana man, William Case, advanced.

On Tuesday, the justices heard argument in Bowe v. United States, involving a complex (and confusing) area of law: habeas, which allows people confined by the government to challenge the grounds for their detention.

Clear Statements is a recurring series by Abbe R. Gluck on civil litigation and the modern regulatory and statutory state.

As most SCOTUSblog readers know, just over a year ago, the court decided Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overruling what had been among the most cited cases in the U.S. Reports: Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Loper Bright marked the end of a 40-year regime under which, if a statute regulating an agency contained ambiguous terms, courts generally would defer to the agency’s expertise in resolving those ambiguities – even if that meant that statutory meaning could change from one administration to the next.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared ready to strike down a 2024 congressional map that a group of voters has challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering – that is, according to them, it sorts voters based on race in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. During nearly two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments, the court’s conservative justices signaled that they are likely to undermine a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, even if they may not ultimately strike it down altogether.

Wednesday’s oral argument was the latest chapter in a dispute that dates back to 2022, when Louisiana adopted a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. Roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black, but the 2022 map had only one majority-Black district out of the six districts allotted to the state. That prompted a group of Black voters to go to federal court, where they argued that the 2022 map violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination in voting practices.