Supreme Court denies Florida’s request to enforce state law on illegal immigration

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Thursday morning read:

• Anxiety floods federal workforce (Erin Schumaker, Ben Johansen, Sophia Cai, and Irie Sentner, Politico)
• After term jammed with Trump’s appeals, Supreme Court’s emergency docket may stay hot (Melissa Quinn, CBS News)
• Supreme Court ruling on Trump’s ‘large-scale’ firings is a win for common sense — and democracy (Editorial Board, The New York Post)
• SCOTUS: The highest (and only) court (Kelsey Reichmann, Courthouse News Service)
• The Supreme Court Can Save Women’s Sports (Suzanne Beecher, Newsweek)

ScotusCrim is a recurring series by Rory Little focusing on intersections between the Supreme Court and criminal law.

Welcome to the initial biweekly “ScotusCrim” column for SCOTUSblog, which we hope will help fill a gap in Supreme Court coverage. During most terms, public attention focuses on grand social-issue decisions (like this term’s United States v. Skrmetti) or cases with large “political” implications (like this term’s Trump v. CASA). Crime is a big seller in movies and television, but the criminal law system itself is far less dramatic and generally fails to hold the public’s attention. This column aims to bring the criminal side of the Supreme Court’s docket back into focus.

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Wednesday morning read:

• Climate Activists Use Supreme Court’s Samuel Alito’s Words to Boost Lawsuit (Jenna Sundel, Newsweek)
• The Supreme Court Says the President Can Fire People (The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal)
• The Inscrutable Supreme Court (Paul Rosenzweig, The Atlantic)
• Religion at the Supreme Court (Mark Movsesian, The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason)
• The Bleak Unifying Principle of This Supreme Court Term (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate)

The most surprising part of the Supreme Court’s Thursday order enabling the Trump administration to move forward with sending eight immigrants to South Sudan wasn’t the decision. After all, the court had already sided with the government on deportations to third-party countries in late June; Thursday’s order clarified the reach of that opinion, rather than revealing something truly new.

Instead, the surprise came from Justice Elena Kagan, who, rather than siding with her liberal colleagues, spotlighted her break from them with a brief concurring opinion. 

In Dissent is a recurring series by Anastasia Boden on Supreme Court dissents that have shaped (or reshaped) our country. 

It was a case that sent one justice into a mental health crisis and is said to have left another, just two weeks later, on the floor of his chambers from a stroke. A case that Chief Justice Earl Warren – the same man who presided over Brown v. Board of Education – called the most consequential of his career. Indeed, Baker v. Carr was so contentious it had to be argued twice. And though it was “merely” about maps, it produced a barnburner of a dissent that’s still relevant to debates about the proper role of judges today.