Divided Argument

We're live at WashU Law's Admitted Students Day! After catching up on some shadow docket activity, we dig into Olivier v. City of Brandon, the Court's unanimous March 2026 decision by Justice Kagan. A Mississippi street preacher pleads no-contest to violating an amphitheater protest-zone ordinance, pays his $304 fine, then sues under §1983 to stop future enforcement — and the Fifth Circuit says the puzzling Heck v. Humphrey rule bars the whole thing. We work through why Heck is stranger than it first appears, what the Court got right in resolving the circuit split, and what the decision reveals about the ongoing mess at the intersection of §1983 and habeas.

We announce an exciting new partnership with SCOTUSblog and introduce the show to new listeners. We then return to the mysterious origins of the Chief Justice's "no, no, a thousand times no," debate the Court's new policy designed to maintain secrecy, and then take a close look at Galette v. New Jersey Transit Corporation, a sovereign immunity decision in which the Court may, or may not, have paid attention to Will's amicus brief.

It's our live show at the University of Chicago! Hosted by the University of Chicago Federalist Society, we discuss this week's big shadow-docket rulings about gender transitions in California Schools (Mirabelli v. Bonta) and redistricting in New York (Malliotakis v. Williams), and also break down the recent merits decision about the right to counsel when a defendant is testifying (Villareal v. Texas).

With unpredictable timeliness, we have a quasi-emergency episode on the 170-page tariffs decision, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. Come for the in-the-weeds legal analysis, stay for the deep dive into the origins of the phrase "no, no, a thousand times no."

We're back for another live show at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, hosted by the Northwestern Federalist Society! We discuss the term's two Second Amendment arguments -- first recapping the oral argument in Wolford v. Lopez, featuring Hawaii's law about getting consent to bear arms on private property; and then previewing the oral argument in United States v. Hemani, about the ban on possession of guns by drug users.

With shocking and uncharacteristic efficiency, we manage to discuss three merits opinions and one orders list dissent in only 47 minutes. Specifically, we revisit Coney Island Auto Parts Unlimited, Inc. v. Burton (time limits for moving to vacate void judgments) and break down Berk v. Choy (an Erie doctrine puzzle), and Ellingburg v. United States (criminal restitution and the Ex Post Facto Clause), while also managing to discuss Justice Jackson's broadside against the Court's practice of "martinization."

We didn't get the tariffs decision this week, but we discuss two of the opinions we did get -- Bost v. Illinois Board of Elections, a decision about standing and election law, and Case v. Montana, a rare Fourth Amendment case -- in a remarkably efficient episode (after a brief detour into Grok's jurisprudence and the announcement of a major gift to the Constitutional Law Institute).

We're back with the first episode of the new year, breaking down the interim docket opinion/order in Trump v. Illinois, the national guard case, after first warming up with new Erie scholarship, state criminal jurisdiction over federal officers, and some recent online discourse.

We're back to break down a month's worth of shadow docket activity -- three recent summary reversals, plus the stay in the Texas gerrymandering case (Abbott v. LULAC). We also discuss the launch of the SCOTUSblog "interim docket blog."

Will and Dan record a rare live show in an unusual venue: the Salamander Resort in Middleburg, Virginia, at the annual attorney retreat for trial boutique Wilkinson Stekloff. Dan teaches Will some of the new lingo he's learned from the firm's trial experts before a deep dive into civil procedure. First, we dig into the recently argued Coney Island Auto Parts Unlimited v. Burton, which presents a seemingly easy legal question and harder questions about SCOTUS advocacy and ethics. Then we look back at last Term's LabCorp v. Davis, which the Court DIG'd but which raises some fundamental questions about class action litigation that the Court is likely to revisit down the road.

After a predictably unpredictable set of detours through Latin grammar, parenting philosophies, and 90s video games, we catch up on the latest shadow (interim?) docket activity and recap the oral argument in the tariffs cases.