View from the CourtView from the Court
Mark Walsh
Contributor174 Articles
Mark Walsh has covered the U.S. Supreme Court since 1991. He is a contributing writer to Education Week, where he has long covered education issues in the courts. Walsh also writes the Supreme Court Report column for the ABA Journal, the American Bar Association magazine. In 2013, he began writing the “View from the courtroom” feature for SCOTUSblog, which documents unusual occurrences in the courtroom such as dissents from the bench. Walsh has a degree in journalism, with a minor in political science, from Northwestern University.
View from the CourtView from the Court
Trump attends birthright citizenship argument
As soon as President Donald Trump mentioned attending argument in the birthright citizenship case in Trump v. Barbara today, some Supreme Court reporters were dubious.
Watching tariffs come down
Today is the first time the court is taking the bench since its nearly four-week mid-winter recess. It is a day for bar admissions and possible opinions before the February sitting starts in earnest on Monday. The tariff case is hanging in the air.
The full Fed battle
It is a crisply cold winter morning in Washington as people filed into the Supreme Court for Trump v. Cook, about President Donald Trump’s effort to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
No tariff opinion
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” A couple of years ago, the Supreme Court shifted the one “non-argument day” it holds for almost every argument session sitting to the Friday before the session starts, instead of the Monday after the two weeks of arguments.
SCOTUS FOCUSExplainers
The Irish court
The ethnic milestones and makeup of the Supreme Court have long been topics of fascination, from the notion of a “Jewish seat” filled by those who followed Justice Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish justice in 1916 to the recognition that Justice Antonin Scalia received as the first Italian American on the court in 1986 to Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s embrace of her role since 2009 as the first Latina to serve.
Trump’s tariffs: from dollars to donuts
Security around the U.S. Supreme Court building is amped up a bit this morning, almost as if somebody really important was planning to attend.
The court opens for business despite a federal shutdown
Just as the Supreme Court tends to stay open when a two-inch snowfall in Washington terrorizes the snowflakes of the federal Office of Personnel Management and closes the executive branch, the budget impasse that has shut down much of the federal government has not kept the court from opening its new term on schedule today.
Closing the book on the term
It was a bit of a shock on Thursday when Chief Justice John Roberts announced at the end of the session that the court would next sit on Friday and “at that time we will announce all remaining opinions ready during this term of the Court.” With six significant cases outstanding, that would make for one heckuva final day, everyone seemed to agree.