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Twenty cases, four Court days. Let’s do this.

By Cara L. Gallagher
Weekend Contributor

Screen Shot 2015-06-14 at 1.44.51 PMTomorrow, at 10am EST, we may learn what the future holds for same-sex couples in 13 states that ban gay marriage, millions of Americans on Obamacare, and men on death row awaiting executions in 31 states that allow capital punishment. And these are only three of the twenty cases from this term with decisions that have yet to be announced in the final weeks before the Court adjourns until October. It’s gonna be a busy week at the Supreme Court.

According to the Court’s website, if they don’t announce decisions on those three cases tomorrow, there are four more days left this month for it to happen. Twenty cases left to announce is peculiar, especially for this time of year. It’s atypical for the Court to deliver five decisions a day, which they’d have to do if they were to disburse the decisions equitably each day. I’ve heard three maybe four decisions in one day, but that was a heavy volume. Two or three is more common and, worth mentioning, appreciated by those of us inside relegated to pen, paper, and bad handwriting. Conversely, last Monday’s non-conference day yielded only one decision about the president’s “exclusive power to grant formal recognition to a foreign sovereign,” in Zivotofsky v. Kerry.

As inclined as we are to find such cases about healthcare, death penalties, and marriage relatable in that they raise questions that hit close to home, they’re also all extremely technical and require decisions written with expert tailoring and efficiency. Our impatience and the fact that great hues and cries will promulgate the air waves after the decisions matter very little to the justices, who know every word they use to interpret the laws live on a “millennia,” to use a word belabored during the same-sex marriage oral arguments. This takes time.

Crafting drafts of opinions for some cases may still be in the final stages, which is likely why we only got one decision last week and why so many decisions linger. There are also multiple dissents to write and concurrences, or decisions written by some justices when they agree with the majority but on different legal grounds. Given the nature of the cases this term, you can bet there will be concurrences, some of which may sound more like a dissent than an agreement. Frequent concurrence author Justice Scalia, who penned 24% of the concurrences written last term, has been known to do this.

One thing’s for sure, twenty cases in four days will make for an frenetic conclusion to the term. It’s also likely more days will be added to the Court’s scheduled, as has been the case in the last few years. According to the Court’s calendar, another day has already been added this week, Thursday, for decisions. If you’re a court watcher anxiously awaiting decisions, let this be a heads up to keep your eyes on the #SCOTUS Twitter hashtag, which will be updated with last minute changes to the Court’s calendar faster than the Court’s website. Make Hootsuite, Spredfast, or Sprout Social your new favorite social network management platform to organize Supreme Court news into a simple stream so you can exclusively follow #SCOTUS news via the hashtag. I’ll be in D.C. starting Tuesday and promise to help keep the interwebs and Twittersphere up to date with the latest news as we come to a thrilling close this term.

Follow Cara on Twitter @SupremeBystandr.

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47 thoughts on “Twenty cases, four Court days. Let’s do this.”

  1. DBQ

    Yes, non-hysterical is good. Relevant, on topic, informative, and open for discussion is also good.

  2. I also would like to thank Cara Gallagher for her contributions and especially this on the Supreme Court’s decisions this week. Some very important and interesting cases are being decided. Things that immediately may affect all of us.

    It is good to get a professional viewpoint and non-hysterical discussion of the cases.

  3. I’ve greatly enjoyed Cara’s Gallagher’s contribution to the blog. She brings an excitement to SCOTUS, distilling legal issues and implications to make them more accessible to those of us who are not lawyers.

    She reminds me of the teacher who opened my eyes to Shakespeare. I just slogged through Shakespeare, resentfully, until I took his class. We would spend an entire day on a single page, he’d bring in the history, the intrigues, and by the end of the class, he could bring us to tears with the emotion of a play. Such people are a gift.

  4. Wow. This is going to be an exciting week. The climate at the SC this week must be intense.

  5. @NickS and Pogo

    Yep. If the gay crap continues, that is a problem that will manifest itself over the next few hundred years, if not sooner. If the rate of exclusive same-sex activity grows by a few percentage points, say to 8% from about 3% or 4%, the the 2.2 children per woman rate needed to maintain will go up.

    But, problems with porn, masturbation, feminism, and financial pressures brought about by politicizing sex are an even greater factor. In Japan, “Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060.” :

    The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact”. More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

    Japan’s under-40s won’t go forth and multiply out of duty, as postwar generations did. The country is undergoing major social transition after 20 years of economic stagnation. It is also battling against the effects on its already nuclear-destruction-scarred psyche of 2011’s earthquake, tsunami and radioactive meltdown. There is no going back. “Both men and women say to me they don’t see the point of love. They don’t believe it can lead anywhere,” says Aoyama. “Relationships have become too hard.”

    Aoyama cites one man in his early 30s, a virgin, who can’t get sexually aroused unless he watches female robots on a game similar to Power Rangers. “I use therapies, such as yoga and hypnosis, to relax him and help him to understand the way that real human bodies work.” Sometimes, for an extra fee, she gets naked with her male clients – “strictly no intercourse” – to physically guide them around the female form. Keen to see her nation thrive, she likens her role in these cases to that of the Edo period courtesans, or oiran, who used to initiate samurai sons into the art of erotic pleasure.

    The sense of crushing obligation affects men just as much. Satoru Kishino, 31, belongs to a large tribe of men under 40 who are engaging in a kind of passive rebellion against traditional Japanese masculinity. Amid the recession and unsteady wages, men like Kishino feel that the pressure on them to be breadwinning economic warriors for a wife and family is unrealistic. They are rejecting the pursuit of both career and romantic success.

    “It’s too troublesome,” says Kishino, when I ask why he’s not interested in having a girlfriend. “I don’t earn a huge salary to go on dates and I don’t want the responsibility of a woman hoping it might lead to marriage.” Japan’s media, which has a name for every social kink, refers to men like Kishino as “herbivores” or soshoku danshi (literally, “grass-eating men”). Kishino says he doesn’t mind the label because it’s become so commonplace. He defines it as “a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant”.

    The phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen (“Girly Men”) was a tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he loved baking cakes, collecting “pink sparkly things” and knitting clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of Japan’s corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the generation they spawned.

    A whole lot more of this at the link.

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex

    Coming soon to a country near you!

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  7. SeewhatImean?

    When borderlines with daddy issues rule the world, there’s endless whining about The Unfairness of Life and therefore It Must Be Someone’s Fault so Let’s Blame Someone for My Feelbads (currently it’s white males, especially the hetero non-atheists), but they can’t run or build or fix or invent anything useful, just agitate over a declining and tasteless pie.

  8. Better for bigoted medical personnel to be unemployed than expose some patient that falls into the ‘wrong’ group to that level of inhumanity. It seems unbelievable that those who should have dedicated their lives to healing, have instead dedicated it to hating.

  10. Fareed Zakaria had an interesting piece yesterday about how successful countries are becoming underpopulated.

  11. It is a certainty, then, that SCOTUS will, in raising gay marriage to its rightful pedestal above cisgender hateophobe cisnormative hatery hater trad-marriage cavepeople breeders (*spit*), make all disagreement obsolete and in effect illegal.

    As such, Inga and Max will get what they always wanted, a mincing whining grasping dystopia that will last about 30 years.

    As a result, I will have to say goodbye to all commenting, much as I prefer to remain employed while Western Civilization falls to the grifter elite form DC, the feral sociopaths from Chicago, the billionaire socialists, the criminal class form San Pedro Sula, and the barbarian Moors.

    If, unexpectedly, SCOTUS remembers that we have a Constitution,then the decline will be somewhat slower, and free speech will remain so, for the moment.

  12. “we may learn what the future holds for same-sex couples in 13 states that ban gay marriage”

    Oh, it’s a certainty we’ll learn that marriage is dead, at least in the term that has any useful meaning for perpetuating civilization.

    What we’ll have is a trite and ephemeral contract between any and all, and the forced participation in all things gay, i.e., the dysgenic and dyscivic anti-marriage marriages.

  13. Are you ready? HEY! Are you ready for this? Are you standing on the edge of your seat????

  14. Cara, I am so happy that you’ve become a W.C. on this blog. You’ve raised the level of professionalism on this blog; a much needed improvement for the weekend.

    And I very much appreciate, make that admire, your frequent use of subtle (“wink, wink”) humor. Who says serious topics have to be discussed in the tone of a eulogy? For those without a sense of humor on this blog, and there are many, see: “interwebs”, “great hues and cries”.

    Welcome. We’ve been waiting a long time….

  17. “Feral” must be on Squeeky’s Racist Word of the Day calendar.

  19. Well, if SCOTUS rules against gay marriage as a constitutional right, they will all have to get their suits Scotch-Guarded because of all the pies that will thrown at them. Plus, they will have to barricade their homes from all the feral gays. Plus, if any of them are secretly bathroom toe tappers, they will have to tell their families because they will be outed.

    If they rule in favor of gay marriage, then all the HIV clinics will have to order extra test kits for all the celebratory sodomy. Sooo, maybe SCOTUS is secretly investing in pharma companies using their insider info???.

    That’s just my thoughts on the delay.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  20. Wow, as soon as tommorow?! I was thinking they’d wait until the 29th, but tomorrow would be great. Hang on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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