Morning everyone! Time for another opinion day live blog -- sponsored by Casetext.
Good morning, everyone! Welcome to our live blog. It's great to be back after the Court's winter recess, although of course we did get a rare set of opinion announcements during the recess.
Now we seem to be back to the new normal, which is opinions on Thursday during an argument week.
Good morning, folks! Anyone want to take a guess on what opinion(s?) we might get this morning?
I'm wondering whether I should be worried that the court's website is not loading on my Safari browser. It is coming up on my iPad, though.
The Court does not announce in advance how many opinions it will release or which ones. There are still a couple of cases remaining from the October session, including Google v. Oracle (which this blog's Tom Goldstein argued), the Ford Motor Co. personal jurisdiction cases, Torres v. Madrid, & Pereida v. Wilkinson. I suppose that's more than a couple.
And then once you get into November, there's plenty to keep us busy guessing, including two big ones: the battle over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and Fulton v. Philadelphia.
On February 10 the Biden administration notified the Court of a change in position in the Affordable Care Act case, although it was really kind of an "FYI" in the sense that the case had already been argued and the government wasn't asking for more briefing.
@KatieBarlow my money is on the first case argued in November: US Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club. But we'll see...
And while we are talking about TikTok, you also need to check out all of Katie Barlow's TikToks (?) for SCOTUSblog, which are also amazing. Don't take my word for it . . . trust my teenagers, who are very impressed by them.
The last time the Florida-Georgia case was before the court, Justice Breyer peppered his opinion announcement with mentions of songs about the Chattahoochie or Apalachicola rivers. I do miss opinion announcements from the courtroom. We're coming up on the anniversary of the last such one.
We forgot about the virtual five-minute buzzer a few minutes ago. Soon time to refresh any and all browsers.
Here we go . . . starting to refresh.
We have the first opinion. It is Brownback v. King.
It is by Justice Thomas, and it is uanimous. Justice Sotomayor has a concurring opinion.
And we do an an R- number, so you all know what that means, right?
This is a case involving the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows a plaintiff to bring some state-law tort claims against the US for wrongdoing by federal employees acting within the scope of their employment,
It includes a provision known as a "judgment bar," which prohibits the plaintiffs from bringing a lawsuit involving the same subject matter if a court enters "the judgement in an action under section 1346(b)." The question before the Court was whether a district court's order dismissing the plaintiff's FTCA claims triggered the judgment bar. The Supreme Court reverses the Sixth Circuit, holding that the district court's decision went to the merits of his claim and therefore could trigger the judgment bar.
As Mark and Kal have noted, we are done for the day. Normally we might have expected more opinions after the recess, but (as I said at the outset of the live blog) they took the unusual step of releasing opinions during the recess, apparently because they could.
At this pace, we may be here until July again. But since they have shown they are willing to add more opinion days even during their normal "off" weeks, maybe not.
Just to be clear, they are finished releasing opinions for the day. You will have to wait at least until next week (we'll know more tomorrow, in all likelihood).
Okay, I think that's it for me today. Thanks so much for joining us, and have a good day. Stay safe, everyone, and hopefully we'll be back here again next week.
Thanks, Amy & Mark! And thanks to everyone for their excellent questions.
Thanks, James as well as Amy, Kal, and Katie! We will have some more exciting opinion days yet this term!
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