WHAT WE'RE READING

The morning read for Tuesday, March 25

The justices this morning will hear two disputes on which federal courts should handle lawsuits over the Clean Air Act, Environmental Protection Agency v. Calumet Shreveport Refining, LLC and Oklahoma v. Environmental Protection Agency. Listen live at 10 a.m. EDT.

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

• Supreme Court to mull jurisdiction for Clean Air Act disputes (Marc Heller, E&E News)
• Resurrected Consumer Group Leads Next Attack on Regulators (Lydia Wheeler, Bloomberg Law)
• Supreme Court confronts another challenge to the Voting Rights Act (Nina Totenberg, NPR)
• A new Supreme Court case seeks to revive one of the most dangerous ideas from the Great Depression (Ian Millhiser, Vox)
• Law in Mahmoud Khalil’s Case Was Once Struck Down — by Trump’s Sister (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)

Coming up: On Wednesday, March 26, the court expects to issue one or more opinions from the current term. We’ll be live at 9:45 a.m. EDT.

WHAT WE'RE READING

The morning read for Monday, March 24

The Supreme Court’s March session will begin this morning with oral arguments in voting rights case Louisiana v. Callais. The justices will then hear Riley v. Bondi, a dispute over the 30-day deadline to seek review of a Board of Immigration Appeals ruling denying withholding of deportation. Listen live at 10 a.m. EDT.

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

• Supreme Court hears Louisiana racial gerrymandering claim (Lawrence Hurley, NBC News)
• US Supreme Court to turns away casino mogul Wynn’s bid to challenge NY Times v. Sullivan defamation rule (John Kruzel, Reuters) 
• Louisiana is ‘tired’ of fighting over its congressional maps. The Supreme Court will review its districts anyway. (John Fritze, CNN)
• Trump, Roberts on collision course as lawsuits creep toward Supreme Court (Zach Schonfeld, The Hill) 
• The Supreme Court Must Rescue Itself From Its Own Madness (Simon Lazarus, The New Republic)

SCOTUS FOCUS

“We’re not there to provide entertainment. We’re there to decide cases,” Roberts sternly declared. Or did he? — ChatGPT and the Supreme Court, two years later

Just over two years ago, following the launch of ChatGPT, SCOTUSblog decided to test how accurate the much-hyped AI really was — at least when it came to Supreme Court-related questions. The conclusion? Its performance was “uninspiring”: precise, accurate, and at times surprisingly human-like text appeared alongside errors and outright fabricated facts. Of the 50 questions posed, the AI answered only 21 correctly.

Now, more than two years later, as ever more advanced models continue to emerge, I’ve revisited the issue to see if anything has changed.

Successes secured, lessons learned

ChatGPT has not lost its knowledge. It still got right that the Supreme Court originally had only six seats (Question #32) and explained accurately what a “relisted” petition is (Question #43). Many of its responses have become more nuanced, incorporating crucial details that were missing in 2023. For example, when asked about the counter-majoritarian difficulty, the AI easily identified Professor Alexander Bickel as the scholar who coined the term (Question #33). Similarly, when explaining non-justiciability (Question #31), the concept that there are some cases that courts cannot hear, it now includes mootness and the prohibition on advisory opinions among its examples.

CASE PREVIEW

Effort to block second majority-Black district in Louisiana comes to Supreme Court

In 2022, the Louisiana legislature adopted a congressional map that included only one majority-Black district among the six allotted to the state, though a third of the state’s population is Black. The map was challenged in federal court as a dilution of the votes of Black residents and in 2024 the legislature drew another map, this time with two majority-Black districts.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will take up the latest stage in the struggle over Louisiana’s congressional map. Defending the map, the state contends that it was effectively caught between a rock and a hard place as it tried to adhere to both the federal Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. But the voters challenging the new map counter that Louisiana never intended to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and they urge the justices to rule that the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – that is, it sorted voters based primarily on their race.

The federal district court that threw out the 2022 map ruled that it likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars election practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race. The court blocked the state from using the map for congressional elections, and it ordered the state to draw a new plan that would include a second majority-Black district.

OPINION ANALYSIS

Court rules for former Chicago alderman on “false statement” charges

The Supreme Court on Friday threw out a ruling by a federal appeals court in Chicago that upheld the conviction of Patrick Daley Thompson, who served four months in a federal prison for making false statements to bank regulators about loans that he took out but did not repay.

In a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices agreed with Thompson, the grandson and nephew of two former Chicago mayors and himself a former city alderman, that the federal law under which he was convicted does not apply to statements that are misleading but not false. But Friday’s decision left open the possibility that when the case returns to the lower courts, Thompson’s conviction could nonetheless stand because his statements were false.

Friday’s ruling was the most recent of a series of rulings over the past several years in which the court has pushed back against a broader reading of federal criminal laws by prosecutors.