Tag Archives: income tax

Supreme Court Term 2023-24 — Two Weeks to Go (?) Update

By tmess2 | Published June 15, 2024

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...

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Supreme Court Update — Appropriations and Redistricting

By tmess2 | Published May 25, 2024

We are at that point of the Supreme Court terms when we are waiting for the other shoe to drop.  All the arguments and briefing for the term is done, and what is left is for the opinions to slowly drip out.  For now, the Supreme Court is only holding one opinion day per week.  That will be changing soon.

In May, we tend to get the older cases (October, November, and December) that have multiple opinions and newer cases (March and April) that were “easy” unanimous decisions.  As we get later into June, we will get the 5-4 decisions from February, March, and April, and the number of cases will pick up.

So far, in May, there have been three opinion days (with one more set for this Thursday).  On those opinion days, we have gotten, two, three, and three opinions.  With eight opinions down, we still have approximately thirty-five opinions (approximately because there are a few cases that could be consolidated) left to come over the next five weeks.  That number is why we are likely to get multiple opinion days per week in the latter part of June as we need nine to twelve opinion days. Continue Reading...

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Supreme Court Preview — October Term 2023 — Part 2

By tmess2 | Published September 17, 2023

Last week, we took a look at the cases that are set for argument in October and November.  This week, we look at the cases that have been accepted for argument, but have not yet been set for an argument date.  These cases will probably be heard in December or January.

The primary job of the Supreme Court (reflected in the criteria that it lists on its rules for what applicants need to demonstrate before the Supreme Court will accept review) is to assure that courts uniformly interpret and apply federal law.  As such, every case is important to some groups of people.  But the focus in these posts are on those cases which could have a political impact.

First on this list is Muldrow.  This case involves Title VII — the law barring discrimination based on race and gender in employment.  The issue in this case is “transfers.”  Basically, by transfer, we are talking about the reassignment of employees from one job to another job.  Generally, Title VII only applies to “adverse” actions.  As such, the issue is what type of damage/impact does the employee have to show.  At least the argument from the employer is that if the transfer is truly a lateral move with no impact on pay or promotion opportunity, then there is no discrimination.   Obviously, there are other things that impact what qualifies as a desirable job.  Here, the employer is a police department and the transfer is from a detective-type squad to a patrol squad.  Technically, the ranks are equal, but there are reasons why a detective squad is a preferred position.   Needless to say, this case could either indicate an approach to Title VII that would allow it to broadly apply to transfer decisions or an approach in which transfers to nominally equivalent positions will rarely implicate Title VII.  From a practical standpoint, there seems something wrong with an interpretation that would, for example, let an employer assign most women to a night shift and most men to a day shift on the theory that the positions are equivalent, but I would not put such a myopic view past some of the current justices. Continue Reading...

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