Thank you to everyone who answered our call for feedback about this newsletter — we deeply and truly appreciate it. We received some great suggestions and will be incorporating some of them in the weeks ahead.
We’re one week away from the start of the court’s November sitting. We’ll be publishing previews of the cases scheduled to be argued throughout this week.
Several cases on the interim docket are fully briefed and awaiting the court’s ruling, including the Trump administration’s request to be allowed to federalize and deploy the National Guard in Illinois.
Tonight, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is scheduled to speak at Springfield Symphony Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts, about her path to the Supreme Court.
SCOTUSblog’s executive editor, Zachary Shemtob, appeared on The Middle with Jeremy Hobson on Thursday to discuss public trust in the Supreme Court.
Trump’s dramatic rhetoric on tariffs ramps up pressure on Supreme Court (Lawrence Hurley, NBC News) — As the Nov. 5 argument on his authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act draws closer, President Donald Trump is speaking regularly about how disastrous he believes it would be for the Supreme Court to uphold lower court orders striking down the tariffs. Critics of Trump’s trade policy see these comments as an effort to persuade the court to side with him, according to NBC News. “Trump’s remarks over the course of this year reflect a consistent theme: In his view, the tariffs are raising so much revenue and are so important to the country that a court ruling saying that he does not have the authority to impose them would be cataclysmic.”
Nearly all Republican AGs add firepower to Trump’s birthright citizenship push (Ashley Oliver, Fox News) — Attorneys general from 24 states filed an amicus brief on Friday in support of Trump’s petitions for review on his executive order on birthright citizenship. Trump is asking the court to allow his order, which would bar “babies born to mothers living in the country illegally or temporarily visiting” from receiving automatic citizenship, to take effect, according to Fox News. “The state attorneys wrote that they have a unique interest in seeing birthright citizenship limited because it incentivizes illegal immigration, which they said has negatively affected their states.”
With Republican majority, Louisiana Senate votes to push back election dates (Julie O’Donoghue, Louisiana Illuminator) — The Louisiana Senate on Saturday voted to push back 2026 election dates in the state in order to “leave as much time as possible to redraw Louisiana’s congressional map,” according to the Louisiana Illuminator. Lawmakers anticipate having that option after the Supreme Court decides Louisiana v. Callais, a case on race-based redistricting and the Voting Rights Act. “The legislation moves the political candidate qualifying period and two spring election dates for congressional primary contests back by approximately one month.”
Lengthy Execution by Nitrogen Gas in Alabama Renews Concerns Over Method (Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, The New York Times)(Paywall) — Thursday’s execution by nitrogen gas of Anthony Boyd in Alabama spurred “more concerns over the execution method,” because “[w]itnesses described seeing Mr. Boyd convulse and heave for about 15 minutes before being pronounced dead about 15 minutes later,” according to The New York Times. “Proponents of the method say that nitrogen hypoxia is less painful and less prone to error,” but Thursday’s witnesses weren’t the first witnesses to such an execution to describe a long period of writhing and discomfort. Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised concerns about nitrogen hypoxia in her dissent from the court’s denial of Boyd’s request for a stay of execution. “[W]hen a State introduces an experimental method of execution that superadds psychological terror as a necessary feature of its successful completion, courts should enforce the Eighth Amendment’s mandate against cruel and unusual punishment,” she wrote in the dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
How a 2018 Supreme Court decision paved the way for meteoric growth in legal sports betting (Mark Sherman, Associated Press) — The high-profile arrests on Thursday “of more than 30 people, including an NBA player and coach,” in cases alleging rigged “sports bets and poker games” has put a spotlight on a Supreme Court decision from 2018 that “opened the floodgates to [the] legalized sports-betting industry,” according to the Associated Press. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged that “the legalization of sports gambling is a controversial subject” and that opponents feared it would “corrupt professional and college sports,” but he said that Congress took the wrong approach to regulating it. “The trouble with the law, Alito explained, was that Congress did not make betting on sports a federal crime. Instead, it prohibited states from authorizing legalized gambling, improperly infringing on their authority.”