A SHAKEN-UP SESSION WEEK

[Posted November 3, 2010] As you probably know, this week the Supreme Court is in session, considering a slate of 31 arguments (including several that appear to have been consolidated). The caseload is spread out over five days instead of the four we’ve often seen lately, for a couple of reasons. First, 31 cases is a lot; the court has been considering more like 25-28 in recent sessions. Second, this afternoon, a whole slew of baby lawyers are getting sworn in after having passed the July Bar Examination.

Normally, opinion day is the Friday of session week. But this week, the court will hand down opinions tomorrow, Thursday the 4th. That means I’ll start posting analysis tomorrow morning of the decisions from cases argued in September. As I recall the September argument docket, you can expect a lot of criminal-law decisions.

But there’s yet another rub: This week, I have an oral argument scheduled for Friday morning. That means that my analysis of this batch of decisions will be interrupted, as I’ll leave here tomorrow afternoon to travel to Richmond for the night (I never, ever play around with I-64 traffic when I have a 9:00 appearance in Richmond), and I expect to return to the keyboard somewhere around noon on Friday, at which point I’ll pick up where I left off. I hope to have all of the analysis completed over the weekend, but you can start checking late-morning tomorrow if you want to see some early “returns.”