The Supreme Court picked up the pace this week, issuing nine opinions over two days. At this point, the next opinion day is Wednesday. As there are at least twelve opinions left, there is a good chance that Thursday and Friday will be added.
This week’s opinions included the last opinion from November which, as expected, went to Chief Justice Roberts. Justice Kavanaugh had a December opinion which, as noted last week seemed to be the most likely. outcome in terms of which justice would join Justice Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts on the final three cases from December. The other two cases — Purdue Pharma and Jarkesy — will more likely than not be authored by Justice Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts.
For January, as predicted last week, Justice Kagan had the opinion in the Confrontation Clause case leaving only the two Chevron deference cases. It seems highly likely that there will be one opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts or a lead opinion authored by the Chief Justice and a brief unsigned per curiam opinion in the other case.
We did not get any opinions from the February arguments this week. As such, it is still highly likely that we are getting one opinion from Justice Alito, one opinion from Justice Gorsuch, and one opinion from Justice Barrett. If the two social media cases are split, anything is possible.
March became somewhat less clear this week. One of the cases had a per curiam opinion. Given that there are eleven cases from March, and two justices already have a second opinion, that means that one justice will not have an opinion from March — Murthy, the case involving government pressure on social media companies. The two justices without an opinion are Justice Alito and Justice Barrett. My hunch is that the case with the per curiam opinion was originally assigned to Justice Alito but that he could not get a consensus behind his preferred opinion. So instead, the opinion of the court became a per curiam opinion, and he issued a concurring opinion to cover what he was forced to remove from the per curiam opinion. If my hunch is right, that leaves Justice Barrett with Murthy. That is probably a good sign as Justice Barrett has been more of a traditional conservative compared to Justice Alito’s more partisan approach in recent years.
That leaves April. April is still unclear. There are five cases left and four justices without an opinion — Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Jackson. The fifth case could go to anybody other than Justice Thomas and Justice Sotomayor. There is a chance that the immunity case will be a per curiam opinion. The interesting thing is that Justice Jackson is in the mix. None of the cases left are ones that have an obvious “liberal” result. Besides the presidential immunity case, we have a case about the federal bribery statute (and the Supreme Court has been trying to narrow the scope of that statute recently), the January 6 case, a case on criminalizing homelessness, and a case about the interplay between Idaho’s restrictive abortion law and the federal law requiring hospitals to provide emergency care.
Between now and Wednesday, there will be posts about this week’s decisions.
