And Today is Only The *First* Monday!

October 6th, 2014

I’ll admit, today took me by a serious surprise. After nothing big happened last Thursday, I assumed today would be a nice, well-paced start to the term with a Fourth Amendment case I have only casually followed. In fact, I was in my car driving to school when the orders list dropped. Just as I park my car, I am bombarded with emails and tweets about the decision. Compound this with conflicting early reports, and we had a sense of SCOTUS confusion unseen since decision day for NFIB. The only difference was that we *knew* something was coming. What came, surprised us, but we were on call.

Today, none of us knew what happened. After the Court consistently stayed all of the decisions that invalidated same-sex marriage laws, I was of the mind that there were at least five Justices who wanted the lower courts to put their rulings on hold until the Court could consider everything at once. This was the clear message to the lower courts. What changed? I can’t wait till we see all the papers in 50 years (when I’ll be RBG’s age).

But now, the Court is almost daring the lower courts to create a circuit split. We still have the 5th, 6th, and 11th Circuits waiting. Don’t forget about the Texas Supreme Court. We have elections in about a month, so don’t expect any decision before that.

As an aside, today we did a soft launch of FantasySCOTUS. I am very, very glad we didn’t do a hard launch today, as it would have gotten totally swallowed up. Much more on that later this week.