Divided Argument

After a quick check on the Nina Totenberg embargo kerfuffle and one more revelation from Justice Thomas's memoir, we devote the episode to Chatrie v. United States , the Court's first major Fourth Amendment decision in years. We trace how the geofence-warrant ruling builds on — and goes beyond — Katz , United States v. Jones , and Carpenter v. United States , and what's left of the third-party doc...

It's the last opinion day of the term, and the big one landed: Trump v. Barbara , the birthright-citizenship case. We read the majority as the rare easy case and spend most of the episode on why the four dissents each end up somewhere different — and trying to figure out exactly where they actually land. Along the way: a bogus Nina Totenberg story, a Landor GVR that might quietly unsettle a chunk...

The big opinions are coming fast and furious as the Term ends. This episode, we take on two related cases from the penultimate opinion drop day: Trump v. Slaughter , which overrules Humphrey's Executor and clears away for-cause protection for the independent agencies, alongside its interim-docket companion Trump v. Cook , where the very same logic somehow spares the Federal Reserve. The big questi...

We're in triage mode as the Court clears its end-of-term backlog. We run through the week's opinion dump before focusing on two cases that look unrelated but turn on the same question: when may a state rewrite background property law to limit a constitutional right? In Wolford v. Lopez , the Court strikes down Hawaii's rule requiring a property owner's express consent before a firearm may be carri...

The big opinions are starting to drop, and we're doing our best to keep pace. We first discuss Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections , which concerns religious liberty, the scope of Congress's power to create remedies against individuals under the Spending Clause, and whether there's any redress if government officials literally throw your rights into a trash can. We then turn to United St...

We open with the usual grab bag—the "foot fault" pun buried in a Justice Thomas opinion, reading Justice Alito's clerk-hiring tea leaves, and a detour into the metaphysics of conditional resignations and whether you can be confirmed to a vacancy that doesn't exist yet. Then to the merits: Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction , a 9-0 judicial-estoppel case that lets us ask where the doctrine even c...

After puzzling over an interesting follow-up question about Pitchford v. Cain, we unpack a summary vacatur in Whitton v. Dixon . We then spend a while breaking down the latest developments in Allen v. Milligan line, in which we discuss the future of the Purcell principle and whether the Court should be unusually attentive to public appearances in election cases. We finish with Sripetch v. Jarkesy...

The Court has been busy, and we somehow manage to cover a number of developments with unpredictable efficiency. We talk about the Court's latest summary reversal on the "party presentation principle"; Justice Kavanaugh's vindication of his law journal student note in Pitchford v. Cain ; Rutherford and Fernandez, two related cases about the intersection of compassionate release and habeas; and the...

We are joined by guest co-host Professor Pam Karlan at the American Law Institute Annual Meeting for the last live show of season 6. We work through a busy stretch of the interim docket: the Alabama GVR in Allen v. Caster and what Callais has done to Section 2; the denied stay in the Virginia redistricting fight, Scott v. McDougle ; and the mifepristone cases, Danco and GenBioPro v. Louisiana , wh...

The Court’s latest Voting Rights Act decision, Louisiana v. Callais , narrows Section 2 in a way that could reshape redistricting, weaken majority-minority districts, and intensify the fight over how race and partisanship interact in elections. We unpack what the Court said, what it quietly overruled, and why the reasoning matters far beyond Louisiana. We walk through the statutory text, the long-...

A deep dive into the latest Supreme Court news, a couple of unusual shadow docket rulings, and a cross-ideological merits decision that raises classic questions about federal power, preemption, and how much weight lower courts should give to context. We open with reporting on leaked internal Supreme Court memoranda related to the 2016 stay of the Clean Power Plan, including what the documents may...

We recap and reflect on the oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara (the birthright citizenship case) and then analyze the Court's recent decision in Chiles v. Salazar , about the First Amendment limits on Colorado's conversion therapy ban. We also confront the taboo question: Are judicial opinions too long?

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 t...

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 pai...

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...

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 p...

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...

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...

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. 

Divided Argument is in its sixth season! Our first episode of the term focuses, of course, on the latest developments on the shadow docket. These include several grants of interim relief to the Trump administration, as well as some dissents from the denial of certiorari. But first, an update on Dan's travel schedule and ChatGPT usage, and an important correction to our previous episode.

For the season finale, we're joined by Yale law professor Justin Driver to talk about his new book, "The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education." We discuss the conservative cases for and against affirmative action, the post-SFFA world of university admissions, the promise and limits of colorblindness, and the effects of admissions policies on stude...