Good morning and welcome to our live blog.
Good morning, everyone! It's a cold and gloomy day here at the Court.
We are expecting one or more opinions in argued cases this morning. As is almost always the case, we don't know which opinions or how many.
For those of you who are new or new-ish here, the number of boxes is a rough proxy for how many opinions we might get.
Just heard the five-minute buzzer.
Headed in to wait for opinions.
First opinion is Sessions v. Dimaya, from Kagan.
It is a long decision, and the holding is complicated.
It is (and I am summarizing this broadly, because there are a lot of opinions) 5-4: Kaqan, Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Gorsuch.
The lower court's judgment is affirmed.
The Court holds that the residual clause of Section 16 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which defines an aggravated felony to include a "crime of violence," is unconstitutionally vague.
This follows on the Court's decision in Johnson v. United States in 2015, holding that a similar provision in the Armed Criminal Career Act was also unconstitutional.
Gorsuch has a separate opinion concurring in part and in the judgment.
Roberts dissents, joined by Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito. Thomas also has a dissenting opinion joined by Kennedy and Alito.
Breyer has the ruling in Wilson v. Sellers, a federal habeas case.
The decision of the 11th Circuit is reversed and remanded.
The court holds that a federal habeas court reviewing an unexplained state-court decision on the merits should "look through" that decision to the last related state-court decision that provides a relevant rationale and then presume that the unexplained decision adopted the same reasoning. The state can rebut that presumption by showing that the unexplained decision most likely relied on different grounds that the reasoned decision below.
The justices have a short 3-page per curiam in US v. Microsoft.
The Court holds that because the president has signed the CLOUD Act, which provides (among other things) that an e-mail service provider must disclose communications even when they are located outside the United States, there is no longer a live dispute between the parties.
Therefore, the Second Circuit's decision is vacated; the court is sending the cases back to the lower court with instructions to vacate the district court's orders and then to direct the district court to dismiss the case as moot.
This is not a big surprise given the passage of the CLOUD Act and the briefs filed by the US and Microsoft. It is the last opinion of the day; they are now moving on to bar admissions and then oral arguments.
Okay, that's all we have for today. We'll have more on today's decisions, as well as more on today's oral arguments, later on. And we expect to be back here for a live blog and opinions tomorrow. Thanks so much for joining us today!
Thank you to everyone for joining us today. I'm shutting the live blog down now.
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