Good morning, everyone! Welcome to our live blog. I am down at the Supreme Court waiting for orders from last week's conference at 9:30, followed by opinions at 10 am.
As John Elwood noted in his Relist Watch, there were only two new relists last week, but lots of cases that have been sticking around for a long time.
Headed in to wait for orders now. Back soon.
There is one new grant, in Stokeling v. US. This is case # 17-5554.
There is a summary reversal in Kisela v. Hughes, a case out of the 9th Circuit involving the shooting by police of a woman holding a knife.
Court rules that it does not need to decide whether Kisela violated the Fourth Amendment when it used deadly force against Hughes. "For even assuming a Fourth Amendment violation occurred--a proposition that is not at all evident-- on these facts Kisela was at least entitled to qualified immunity."
Justice Sotomayor dissents from the summary reversal in Kisela, joined by Ginsburg.
The grant in Stokeling v. US involves whether a state robbery offense that includes "overcoming victim resistance" as an element is a "violent felony" under the Armed Career Criminal Act.
Thanks to Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed for passing on the question presented in Stokeling.
There were a lot of cases involving the "violent felony" question and the ACCA kicking around, so I assume this is one of them.
There is a dissent (again, from Sotomayor) from the denial of review in Cozzie v. Florida, a capital case.
Turning to opinions, we are operating on the same premise as almost every other opinion day, with the possible exception of the last one. We don't know how many opinions we are going to get, and we don't know which ones.
We only got one opinion last week: in Hall v. Hall, which was argued in January. So that ruling didn't shed much light on who might be writing in some of the other cases earlier in the term. We are still waiting for four, I believe, from October: Epic Systems v. Lewis (arbitration), Gill v. Whitford (partisan gerrymandering), Jesner v. Arab Bank (Alien Tort Statute & corporations), and Sessions v. Dimaya (immigration).
On shortest-lived decisions, the Ledbetter decision overturned by the Lilly Ledbetter Act would be in the running, too. Extra points for Chisolm, though, because it required an amendment, which is way harder.
Five-minute buzzer just sounded.
One box today. For those of you who may be new or new-ish here, the number of boxes is a *rough* proxy for the number of opinions we might get.
Going into wait for opinions now. Back soon.
We have one opinion only. It is Encino Motorcars v. Navarro.
The decision is by Justice Thomas, reversing the decision of the Ninth Circuit and remanding the case.
It is 5-4. Thomas is joined by Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, and Gorsuch.
Ginsburg dissents, joined by Breyer/Sotomayor/Kagan.
Question in the case is whether the exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act's overtime-pay requirement for "any salesman, partsman or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles" at car dealerships applies to service advisors -- the people who consult with you about your car's service requirements and sell you service on your car. The answer is that service advisors are exempt from the overtime requirement.
Thomas concludes that service advisors are exempt because they are "salesment primarily engaged in servicing automobiles."
Thomas's summary of his opinion was pretty short, but -- then again - the opinion only comes in at 11 pages.
In Ginsburg's dissent, she counters that "service advisors neither sell nor repair automobiles" and therefore "should remain outside the exemption and within the Act's coverage."
Given the narrowness of the question in Encino, I think it is somewhat surprising to see the 5-4 dissent. But I think there may be a bit of a "meta" fight going on here about textualism and statutory construction.
Ginsburg dissent makes it (barely) onto the 10th page.
This is the kind of case where Justice Scalia's absence is felt -- would have been fun to see a fight between, say, him and Kagan over what this text says. It would also be possible to imagine him saying that the text says what it says, and it doesn't say precisely what the defendants say, and that's Congress's problem rather than the Court's.
My guess is that service advisors didn't really exist when the exemption was created, which informs what Congress thought it was doing, but not the meaning of the text it enacted. And this is central to one of the "meta" fights about textualism that I'm pointing out here. Some people want to divine, at least if it seems obvious, what Congress was trying to do with the information it had at the time; some people think we just figure out what the words in the text meant to Congress at the time, and work from there. I think those methods probably point in opposite directions in this case.
I'm off to write up today's orders. We likely won't be back until April 17, which is the next day that the court is likely to issue opinions. (No conference this week, and the court is hearing arguments starting on April 16, so we would expect orders on the 16th but no opinions.)
That's all for me today. Happy holidays and cherry blossom season to all.
Thanks, everyone -- until next time!
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