Normally, by this time of the year, the Supreme Court term is coming into focus.  With three weeks to go, typically, there is one or two cases left from the Fall.   While there are always question marks, it is possible to try to figure out results in the key case by who is in the running for getting the remaining opinions from a month.

This year is different.  There are still 29 opinions outstanding out of 62 cases.  While there have been years with more opinions outstanding heading into the last three weeks, those years were back when the Supreme Court was hearing a lot more cases per year.

To date, almost all of the opinions have been in cases that (other than the parties) mostly interested those practicing in that field.  The biggest attention getting case was the decision reinstating (at least for now) the death penalty against the surviving Boston Marathon bomber.  The legally biggest case of the year so far also came from Boston in a Free Exercise/Free Speech case involving Boston’s refusal to let a Christian group use one of the city’s flagpoles in connection with an event even though it routinely gave such permission to nonreligious groups.  That decision may be an indicator of the likely result in some of the remaining cases, but it was merely a continuation of the recent trend in Free Exercise cases. Continue Reading...