With oral arguments concluded for the term, we can expect announcements of cases the Court will hear next term and decisions on the cases argued earlier this term. Orders granting or denying cert. are less predictable, but decisions will be announced beginning at 10am on Mondays (except cases that would be ready on Memorial Day will instead be announced on Tuesday) until the end of June. Edit: The Court has now designated Thursdays as decision days, in addition to Monday releases.
Before the pandemic, the Justices would take the bench on decision days. The author of the majority opinion would announce the holding, and sometimes a dissenting Justice would make a statement as well. Sadly, that is not happening this summer; there is no conference call with an accessible live-stream of decision announcements like there was for arguments.
Instead, watch the Court’s website beginning at 10am Mondays and Thursdays (and Tuesday, June 1). Decisions get posted on the front page, but if you’re actively watching for decisions, then it’s better to monitor this page. The decisions get posted 10 minutes apart and we don’t know in advance how many there will be. But when the “R number” column gets filled in on that page, you know they’re done for the day. (See the scotusblog blurb on R numbers for the details on why this works as an unofficial sign.)
There is no way to predict which cases will be released on any given decision day. Predictably, almost all cases heard in March or later are still unresolved as of this post (May 21), while we have decisions on nearly all the cases argued early in the term.
So it’s worth noting the outliers — a few important cases that were argued back in 2020 but have not been resolved yet. We might expect to see some of these decisions announced fairly soon. But on the other hand, sometimes the most high-profile cases don’t get released until the very last day of the term, perhaps because Justices are taking extra time to craft opinions and dissents. Still:
- Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, involving faith-based adoption agencies that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, was argued on November 4, 2020.
- The Affordable Care Act cases were argued on November 10.
- Nestlé v. Doe, involving claims of child slavery and forced labor in the cocoa industry, was argued on December 1.
- Cases involving the constitutionality of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which was created to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac following the 2008 financial crisis, were argued on December 9.
Of course, many significant and highly watched cases were not argued until the past few months, and some of those could well be decided before the above cases. I’m especially interested in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., involving student First Amendment rights, but it wasn’t argued until April 28. And the decision on the Voting Rights Act cases, argued March 2, could be extraordinarily significant. Lots of reasons to watch!
When all decisions are in, the Court will be in summer recess until the first Monday in October. I may make one more post next month, but this blog will largely go on break until it’s time for a post about the October 2021 calendar.