This past week, the U.S. Supreme Court went from one opinion day (Thursday) per week to two opinion days (Thursday and Friday).  But the Supreme Court only issued three opinions on each day — four of the six have some political significance and so there will be posts on them later.  There are still 23 cases left to be decided (with 21-23 opinions) between them.  Thus unless, the pace of opinions picks up (and maybe 4 per day is likely), the Supreme Court needs at least seven opinion days between now and June 28.  The next opinion day is this Thursday.  While it is more likely than not that opinions will also be released on Friday, that would still leave four or five opinion days for the last week in June.  Maybe the last opinion day will be July 1 or July 2, but the Supreme Court tries really hard to leave town before July 4.

With this week’s opinion release, the dust has started to settle on who likely has what opinion.  Until opinions are released, such guesses are who likely initially got the opinion.  While not common, splits in how to decide a case and justices changing their minds as they dig further into writing an opinion can result in opinions being reassigned.  These predictions are based on the Supreme Court’s practice of trying to maintain a balanced workload — both within each month’s argument session and across the term as a whole.

At this point, enough opinions have been released to identify who still has opinions left to write from the first five months of arguments with two question marks.  The two question marks are two sets of companion cases — one from January in which two cases seek to overturn Chevron deference (a doctrine created by Justice Scalia that has courts deferring to administrative agencies over the proper interpretation of ambiguous regulatory statutes) and the other from February in which two cases involve state attempts to regulate interstate social media websites.  For both sets, it is possible that the Supreme Court will issue separate “authored” (i.e. the justice writing is identified) or that the Supreme Court will issue one “authored” opinion in one case with a brief per curiam (i.e. the justice writing is not identified) in the second case or that the Supreme Court will issue one opinion covering both cases.  If only one authoried opinion is released in both sets of cases, then things fall more smoothly in terms of the number of opinions per justice through February.  If either set has a second authored opinion, that adds an additional opinion for some justice making things more uncertain. Continue Reading...