Brothers in Law is a recurring series by brothers Akhil and Vikram Amar, with special emphasis on measuring what the Supreme Court says against what the Constitution itself says. For more content from Akhil and Vikram, please see Akhil’s free weekly podcast, “Amarica’s Constitution,” Vikram’s regular columns on Justia, and Akhil’s new book, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920.

Elephants don’t hide in mouseholes. Dogs bark when something odd is afoot. Human beings (even members of Congress, sometimes) say what they mean. These common-sense mammalian maxims inform standard legal interpretation. (The preceding links are to opinions authored by Justices Antonin Scalia and Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts, respectively.)

Updated on March 9 at 5:14 p.m.

The Supreme Court added just one case – a technical dispute over the interaction between two federal environmental laws – to its docket for the 2026-27 term. The justices on Monday morning released a list of orders from their private conference last week in which they granted review in Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guahan, but did not act on a variety of other high-profile cases that they considered last week, including a request from Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, to clear the way for a lower court to throw out his conviction for contempt of Congress.

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

The Olympics are one of those rare moments when the country comes together whatever its divisions and stays up late watching a skater joyfully complete a near perfect routine just years after quitting the sport completely – or cheers as a hockey player scores the winning goal in overtime moments after losing a few teeth to an opponent’s stick. The athletes’ personal stories somehow feel like our own.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Tuesday in Hunter v. United States about what exceptions exist to federal defendants’ waivers of their right to appeal. The justices seemed poised to endorse more exceptions than just the two the government endorsed – ones for ineffective assistance of counsel in entering into a plea agreement and for sentences above the statutory maximum. A number of justices also expressed misgivings about relying on contract law to define exceptions to appellate waivers, the framework that both Hunter and the government principally invoked, and a majority seemed likely to hold, at a minimum, that a defendant could escape from an appellate waiver when enforcing it would result in a “miscarriage of justice,” a standard that a number of federal courts of appeals have applied.

Ratio Decidendi is a recurring series by Stephanie Barclay exploring the reasoning – from practical considerations to deep theory – behind our nation’s most consequential constitutional decisions.

Last Monday, the Supreme Court issued two emergency orders in a single evening: Mirabelli v. Bonta, vacating the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit’s stay of a district court injunction protecting parents from California’s gender-identity nondisclosure policies, and Malliotakis v. Williams, staying a New York trial court order that would have redrawn a congressional district before the 2026 midterms. The rulings share little in common on the merits, but they have attracted a unified critique: that the court bypassed necessary procedural steps in a rush to reach preferred results.