There was late breaking news out of Washington this afternoon.  In what would be an unprecedented mistake, an opinion in a pending case was temporarily uploaded to the U.S. Supreme Court website.   Usually, opinions are posted to the Supreme Court website as they are announced in the courtroom (except during COVID when they were released in ten-minute intervals on opinion days).

Aside from the technical error by someone in the Court’s IT or Public Information Department, the glitch is significant for two reasons.  First is the opinion itself, an unsigned per curiam opinion in a pair of casses out of Idaho involving the conflict between Idaho’s extremely stringent abortion law and the federal law requiring hospitals to provide necessary care to patients who arrive in the emergency room.  The lower courts have granted a temporary injunction holding that the federal law allows hospitals to provide abortions in circumstances where it would otherwise be prohibited by Idaho law.  The opinion seems to reflect a 3-3-3 split where the ultimate decision is to dismiss the case (for now) as improvidently granted (without prejudice to being reconsidered after further proceedings have occurred.  However, that split reflects that three justices believe the Supreme Court should affirm the lower court decision and three justices believe that the Supreme Court should reverse the lower court decision.

Second, is what this opinion might mean for the remaining cases.  This case was one of five remaining cases from the April argument.  Before this morning, four justices had not yet issued opinions which suggested that one justice would have two opinions from April.  Justice Kavanaugh released an opinion this morning.  The justices without an opinion are Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Jackson who each fall into a separate part of the 3-3-3 split.  Of these three, only Justice Jackson wrote a separate opinion, and she mostly joins in an opinion by Justice Kagan.  As such, it seems unlikely that one of these three initially had this case and lost it.  That implies that these three justices have the remaining cases — Trump’s immunity case (probably the Chief Justice), the January 6 case and a case about bans on homeless people sleeping in public areas.  On these last two cases, both are equally likely to have a conservative result and a liberal result.   With ten cases left to go, we are likely to know the answer to these questions by Monday (and whether this opinion is going to be pulled from tomorrow’s opinions is an open question).