Jimmy Hoover

4 minute read

They won’t get paid. It’s going to be extremely time-consuming. There is no prior counsel to review their work. And they’ll spend months drafting briefs and preparing for an argument where the best case scenario is achieving a victory on behalf of a client that does not exist.

The nine justices are set to consider the legality of a Tennessee law preventing doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria in trans youth.

In a break from the Supreme Court's standard one-line orders, the court said that it "expects that the Court of Appeals will render its decision with appropriate dispatch."

The case, San Francisco v. EPA, is the second time in two terms that the famously liberal-leaning West Coast municipal government has found itself at odds with the Biden administration in a legal issue at the Supreme Court.

"[T]he United States cannot impose on Oklahoma an obligation to provide abortion referrals when Title X itself does not address referrals at all," the state wrote in its unsuccessful request.

The dog days may be slow for the justices but not for the clerk's office at the nation's top court.

Friday's 2023 disclosure came after Alito sought and received a three-month filing extension from the judiciary, the only member of the U.S. Supreme Court to need extra time to prepare their form.

“I’ve realized that it can be hard to predict the out-of-nowhere question a justice might ask, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said. But a full 90% or more of the questions you will get at argument will be predictable questions. They will be the central issues in the case.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit saw things differently and upheld North Carolina's licensing regime as a regulation of conduct, not speech.