SCOTUStoday for Wednesday, November 19

On this day in 1794, representatives of the U.S. and Great Britain signed Jay’s Treaty, which was named after the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay. Jay had negotiated the terms of the treaty, which aimed to maintain peace between the two countries as tensions continued to simmer more than a decade after the end of the Revolutionary War.

SCOTUS Quick Hits

• On Monday, the Trump administration and lawyers for Illinois and Chicago filed what are expected to be their final briefs on President Donald Trump’s authority to deploy the National Guard to Illinois. The court’s decision in Trump v. Illinois could now come at any time.
• On Tuesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups withdrew their request for the court to pause enforcement of California laws requiring companies to file reports with the state on climate-related issues after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit granted the relief they requested.
• Former Justice Stephen Breyer is scheduled to speak to students at Suffolk University in Boston tomorrow morning. The event is closed to the public.
• Mark your calendars: SCOTUSblog will be hosting a live blog during the oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter on Monday, Dec. 8. The live blog will begin at 9:30 a.m. EST.

Morning Reads

• Federal judges block Texas from using its new US House map in the 2026 midterms (John Hanna, Associated Press) — A panel of three federal judges ruled on Tuesday that Texas cannot use a new congressional map drawn by Republicans. “In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of federal judges in El Paso sided with opponents [of the map] who argued that Texas’ unusual summer redrawing of congressional districts would harm Black and Hispanic residents,” according to the Associated Press. “Texas filed an appeal Tuesday evening with the U.S. Supreme Court after Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans publicly defended the map, which was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats.”
• Redistricting deadlines for the midterms loom as states wait for a Supreme Court ruling (Hansi Lo Wang, NPR) — Texas is not the only state facing redistricting-related challenges right now. According to NPR, several other states hope to redistrict ahead of the 2026 midterms but are running out of time to do so as they wait for the Supreme Court to potentially offer new guidance on the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. “The earlier the decision comes, the more likely the decision is before the date for candidates to declare that they’re going to be running, and the more time there is for legislatures to meet and consider maps and redraw their maps,” said Nick Stephanopoulos, a professor specializing in election law at Harvard Law School, to NPR.
• Tennessee state judge blocks National Guard deployment to Memphis (Dietrich Knauth, Reuters) — Late on Monday, a Tennessee state court judge temporarily blocked Gov. Bill Lee’s “deployment of National Guard troops to the city of Memphis, ruling that the use of troops was likely not legal under the state’s militia law,” according to Reuters. The decision comes as the Supreme Court considers President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy the National Guard to Illinois. There, state and local leaders were against the deployment, so Trump ordered it himself. In Memphis, Lee approved Trump’s request for a deployment and sent in the troops himself. The Memphis lawsuit, brought by state lawmakers and the mayor of Shelby County, “seeks to stop the troop deployment based on Tennessee state law,” while the lawsuit on the Illinois deployment is “based on federal law and the U.S. Constitution.”
• Trump promises $2,000 tariff checks by mid-2026 (Ben Berkowitz, Axios) — Trump continues to raise the possibility of sending $2,000 tariff checks to “individuals of moderate income,” as the Supreme Court weighs whether the tariffs he imposed using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act can remain in place, according to Axios. “We’re going to be issuing dividends later on, somewhere prior to, you know, probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that,” the president said on Monday to reporters in the Oval Office. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent previously has noted that “the dividends would require legislation … and it’s not clear if Congress has the appetite.”
• John Mulaney talks Supreme Court and comedy at Texas Tribune Festival (Charlotte Karner, The Daily Texan) — About 10 days after he was at the Supreme Court listening to oral arguments on Trump’s tariffs, comedian John Mulaney was at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin talking about his career, current events, and what it was like to see the justices at work, according to The Daily Texan. “They seem to get along with each other in a way you might not think,” Mulaney said. “There was a lot of collegiality. If you and nine co-workers had to sit on a panel, you’d eventually lean over and do jokes to each other.”

A Closer Look: The Justices’ Circuit Assignments

Beyond their normal judicial duties – e.g., hearing arguments, deciding on cert petitions, writing opinions, and, at least for the most junior justice, running the cafeteria  – each of the nine justices serves as the circuit justice for one or more of the 13 federal circuits.

Specifically, under 28 U.S.C. § 42, “the Chief Justice of the United States and the associate justices of the Supreme Court shall from time to time be allotted as circuit justices among the circuits by order of the Supreme Court.” Chief Justice John Roberts assigns each justice to their circuit, when possible aligning them with a justice’s prior judicial experience or geographic roots. Currently:

• Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is assigned to the 1st Circuit (she served as a law clerk on the 1st Circuit, as well as on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts);
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor is assigned to the 2nd Circuit (on which she sat as a district and circuit court judge);
• Justice Samuel Alito is assigned to the 3rd and 5th Circuits (having formerly served as a judge on the 3rd Circuit);
• Justice Brett Kavanaugh is assigned to the 6th and 8th Circuits;
• Justice Amy Coney Barrett is assigned to the 7th Circuit (on which she served as a judge for three years)
• Justice Elena Kagan is assigned to the 9th Circuit;
• Justice Neil Gorsuch is assigned to the 10th Circuit (on which he had previously served as a judge); and
• Justice Clarence Thomas is assigned to the 11th Circuit (which includes his native state of Georgia).

Roberts himself handles the D.C., 4th, and Federal Circuits (he served on the D.C. Circuit from 2003-2005).

So what do circuit assignments entail? Responsibilities include, among other things, dealing with requests to stay lower-court orders (as shown by Jackson’s recent administrative stay in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program case) or deciding whether to pause executions. That said, the full court may review and reverse such decisions, and the circuit justice thus often refers significant emergency requests to the full court for review.

The circuit-level work harkens back to the Judiciary Act of 1789, which compelled Supreme Court justices to take twice-yearly treks across the country to hear lower court cases. Begun as a cost-saving measure, this soon devolved into an exhausting ordeal, with justices braving snow (see this letter from Justice William Cushing to President George Washington of his journey) and long travel periods. Following an increase in the number of judges and passage of the Judicial Code of 1911, circuit riding officially ended. Fortunately for the justices, their circuit responsibilities can now usually be handled remotely.

SCOTUS Quote

“The Court’s authority — possessed of neither the purse nor the sword — ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction.”

Justice Felix Frankfurter in Baker v. Carr

On Site

From Kelsey Dallas

What Remains on the Interim Docket?

Over the past two weeks, the Supreme Court resolved two of the longest-standing matters on its interim docket with orders clearing the way for the Trump administration to implement new rules for sex markers on passports and denying a request to allow a young girl set to be sent to family members in Venezuela to remain in Texas with her mother. And on Friday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor addressed a more recent request, declining to intervene in a dispute over $40 million held in a New York bank account. The oldest pending request from the Trump administration concerning its effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook won’t be resolved until January at the earliest. So what does that leave on the justices’ short-term to-do list? Read Kelsey’s analysis to find out.

Contributor Corner

The Court’s New Voting Case Will Test Its Supposed Nonpartisanship

In his latest Justice, Democracy, and Law column, Edward Foley explored the significance of the court’s new case on whether mail-in ballots must be received by election officials on or before Election Day to be counted and contended that the justices’ preferred “democracy-neutral textualism” means they should “uphold Mississippi’s law permitting absentee ballots to arrive up to five business days after Election Day. Were the court to decide otherwise,” Foley wrote, “it would place the interest of Republican litigants over its own supposed commitment to textualism, and paint the rule of law as a charade when it comes to the enforcement of electoral procedures.”