 Again, for the recording, we're joined by Dr. John Hall and Dr. Annie Watson, and I'm Dr. Christopher Lawrence. Let's see. Our first question is for Dr. Hall and Dr. Watson. What is the spring quotes, quote-unquote, October term, and why is it so important to the business of the court? I'll bottom my eyes on. Fantastic question. Welcome, everyone, thank you all for joining us tonight. I am sure there are no students here or here just for the extra credit, but to further the learning process. I'll jump on this first one. This won't necessarily be the longest answer. The October term, what is that? Well, that's quite literally when the Supreme Court begins. Technically, they go year-round from October to October, but they generally take off an extended recess for July, August, and September. In October, that's when the season kicks off, if you will. There are several cases that are upcoming on the docket that we'll be talking about tonight. What is the October term? That's the beginning of the new year for the Supreme Court, and it's important because it's the beginning of the Supreme Court's new year. Very circular. Did Dr. Watson have anything to add to that? Yeah, pretty straightforward. I don't have much to add to that either, so we'll quickly move along to the second question. How do arguments before the Supreme Court work and can any case be appealed to the Supreme Court? If I get a parking ticket or something, can I complain to the Supreme Court and get my rights vindicated? I can take it. At least the second part of that question. Cases typically reach the Supreme Court in one of three ways. On appeal from a federal circuit court, on appeal from a state Supreme Court, or through original jurisdictions, but that is incredibly rare, and so almost always they are going to hear cases on appeal through their appellate jurisdiction. In order for a case to be heard by the Supreme Court, they have to get four out of nine justices on board. We call this the rule of four quite creatively, and in general, they really only agree to hear issues or cases related to issues that they deem to be important to the entire country and typically related to the Constitution in some way. Every year, they receive about seven to 8,000 applications. They agree to hear about 200 sort of. 80 are actually argued, give or take, and then the rest are sort of decided on their shadow docket and through other means. Okay. Great. Dr. Hall, have you wanted to add to that or did you watch on the first part of the question? Dr. Watson nailed a very thorough answer there in terms of how to arguments get to the court. The three main routes are from the federal court itself from appeals from the state Supreme Court provided there's some connection to a constitutional liberty. In terms of how cases themselves are decided, that can be a very short or a long story. Again, throughout the entire year, the Supreme Court is entertaining for the most part appeals from either lower circuit courts, federal level or state Supreme Courts. As Dr. Watson pointed out, they will actually hear a small percentage of the cases that are before them, mainly because on the one hand, they don't want to be too active, but they want to be active enough. There are only nine Supreme Court justices, so they're not really going to be able to handle 8,000 cases a year. The process itself is relatively straightforward. Once they have accepted a case to hear on appeal, they will have briefs submitted from the lower court from both sides, describing or summarizing their arguments. The rule of four will get that case before that, of course, onto the docket. The justices will hear oral arguments, which are debatable. Hollywood makes them seem exciting. Oral arguments are what we're thinking of when we think of what the Supreme Court does. The benefit of oral is questionable. There's a great deal of research that suggests the justices may have already made up most of their mind. Oral arguments can last for about 30 minutes, very few exceptions. What do you think of the large, the most important landmark opinions in the Supreme Court history? It's interesting to think that those attorneys had 30 minutes before the court. Then they will go into conference. They will discuss amongst themselves the opinion is constantly evolving. When it is apparent which direction the court is going to go, if the Chief Justice of the court is in the majority, he can write the opinion or assign someone to write it. If the Chief Justice isn't in the majority, then the most senior member of the court in the majority can assign the opinion or either write it themselves. Opinions, I don't want to get off on a tangent here, but they are an incredibly important characteristic of the court. The court isn't issuing decisions. Sometimes I'll say that in class and any time I do, I'm being intellectually lazy. They issue opinions. These are educated opinions by a group of lifetime officials whose fidelity is in the Constitution. They have no enforcement power, so obviously they're not issuing decisions, their opinions and they make arguments as to why they believe the way they believe regarding their interpretation of the Constitution in each individual case. I can keep going for the rest of the hour on this. I'm going to stop there purposefully, but Dr. Watson did a great job. I'm going to stop there. Thanks. I will make one follow-up point. To regards the number of cases this year, I feel like the docket's actually pretty small so far. Maybe we'll see some cases jumping on in the next couple of weeks. But right now, they've only agreed to hear 27 cases this year. Here are oral arguments for 27 cases this year. The docket is actually quite short compared to most years. Yeah, that's a good point. Dr. Watson pointed out towards the beginning of the typical year, although it's been decreasing, is to have about 80 to 100 cases that actually get oral argument, and so 27 would be incredibly low by historical standards, although the trend has certainly been lower. So whether that represents the court being more choosy in its case selection, or whether that's just early days yet, it could be just early days yet, because certainly the court accepts more cases later on in its term historically. It remains to be seen, right? But certainly the trend has been downward. There was a time when the court heard hundreds of cases per year, but increasingly they're not doing as many, or at least not giving them, as Dr. Watson said, they're using something called the shadow docket, a lot more perhaps, to expedite some of those cases that might have gotten full oral arguments before. And that's something we can talk about more later on if there are any questions about that. I don't know if anybody is really interested in getting that arcane, but if you are interested, yeah, that might be something we can talk about later on. A case that definitely was not on the shadow docket, though, how's that for a transition, was one that the official opinions were released about three months ago, probably the most dramatic opinion, I would say, of certainly the last term, if not the last few years before the Supreme Court, and that was the Supreme Court's ruling and decision in Dobs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that dealt with abortion. So first, what was the effect of this decision on the law, and what perhaps has been its, or what is its ongoing political impact? So to understand this particular case, it helps to understand a couple of other cases that led up to it. One is Roe v. Wade, the other is Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And so Roe was the original Supreme Court case related to abortion protections and regulations at the national level in the United States. In 1970, Jane Roe, which is a fictional name to protect the plaintiff's identity, filed a lawsuit against Henry Wade, who is the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, challenging a Texas law there that made abortion illegal except to save a woman's life. The outcome of that case was that states may not regulate abortion decisions. They can't ban them entirely in the first trimester. After the first trimester, which is about 13 weeks, they can impose reasonable restrictions. And then after starting in the third trimester, they can basically ban as much as they want. That was decided in 1973. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey followed. In this case, the Supreme Court upheld the right to access abortions, but they did change the way that they allowed states to get involved and create these kinds of restrictions. And so instead of looking at the kind of trimester scale, they instead shifted to viability, which is the point at which a fetus can survive on its own outside of the pregnant individual's body. And so these were the two national level protections for abortion until we got to dogs. And so in 2018, Mississippi passed a law that banned basically all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases where the pregnant individual's life was at risk. So there were no exceptions for rape. There were no exceptions for incest. The Jackson Women's Health Organization is Mississippi's only abortion clinic, and they sued. What we saw in the decision was that the majority of the court decided to overturn its previous rulings in Roe and Casey. And so they argued that the only people who are qualified to make sort of decisions about this, especially at the national level, are elected lawmakers. And so instead of creating a new set of regulations or standards, they just stripped the national level standards, which means that legally speaking, this has reverted back to regulations existing at the state level. And so today, I actually looked these up today, what we have is that 14 states have completely banned abortions. One state, that's Georgia, has banned all abortions after six weeks. Three states have bans after 15, 18 or 20 weeks. Nine states have blocked bans that will probably eventually take force. 10 states have legalized abortions with some limitations, particularly access to federal funds. And then 15 states have legalized abortions typically to the point of viability, although not always, sometimes there are no gestational limits. And so I have, I could talk about this all night, as we're calling back to John before, but I'll turn it over to you if you'd like to take away the political index. Great summer there, Annie. Again, this is something we could talk about for days. You did a great job of trying to fill in anything and not repeat and find a spot to stop. With regards to Dobbs, this is one of the more controversial slash important opinions in my lifetime. Granted, that's relative, but I would say that easily. As we've covered in class, so we haven't really gotten to certain parts, but to constitutionally look at what was Justice Alito thinking when he wrote this opinion, if you look at it from a constitutional perspective, how could this guaranteed constitutional liberty that protected over half of our population being female? How could this be struck down? How could the court do this? Constitutionally, what Justice Alito did was he attacked it from a constitutional argument. Now, you might ask, how did we get to have a right to abortion? This is something from my class that we've just introduced. Are there any liberties that are guaranteed by the Constitution that are not in the Constitution? As we all know, yes. The Ninth Amendment philosophically recognizes that liberties do exist that aren't necessarily written down by James Madison in 1791. So this gives birth to what we've already started to introduce substantive due process. Liberties that are protected by the Constitution that are not in the Constitution. By definition, some would look at that very principle as controversial, but the right to have an abortion is protected by privacy established in 65 by Griswold, which again, we've been discussing. From that perspective, and again, I'm trying to make a constitutional argument as to why Alito did what he did. You're starting from a possibly controversial area of substantive due process. Also, what was the reality of abortion rights pre-73? Because making a mistake, we are now pre-73 again. It was handled by state legislatures. The federal government was mandating or recognizing a constitutional right that everyone had, which to some was encroaching on state government power. So that's a second variable that was controversial that's in this opinion. Another variable is abortion. Regardless of your thoughts on it, you could argue that it is somewhat a controversial procedure. So there's a lot going on in Roe. What does Justice Alito do in Dove's? And again, I can't stress this enough. I'm trying purposely to attack it constitutionally to identify what happens. None of my opinion should ever come out here and hope it doesn't, but constitutionally, Alito went after the weed spots of Roe. He went after the inherent weaknesses that you can find when something involves substantive due process, when it involves federalism in this case. I'll leave it at that. This opinion, again, is one of the more important opinions of my life. We are making no mistake about it. If you were to think of Dobs and you're not familiar with it, did abortion just get banned because we overturn Roe? In case you know, we just returned it back to the 50 states. But for at least 30 states, it's gonna be banned. There might be 20 states left that have abortion rights. Some states are expanding abortion rights. But if anyone lives in Georgia or knows anyone who lives in Georgia, geographically, you're going to be looking at maybe Illinois or Maryland, maybe Virginia, if you want to have access to a legal and safe abortion. I'm including any and all states that have a heartbeat bill as banning abortion because of the vast majority of women who do not know they're pregnant when a fetal heartbeat is detectable. We also have, again, in terms of where we're going, just look to our sister state, my home state, Alabama, has banned all abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest, only for the life of the mother. So that's where we are. Again, this is an issue that we can discuss quite literally forever. Annie did a great job introducing it. Where are we now with our constitutional right to an abortion if you are biologically female? Depends on the state. And from what we're seeing, about 30, at least 30 out of 50 states are fundamentally going to ban the practice. How does that affect us? Again, more on that later. I'll stop there because it's as good a spot as any. I do have a couple of follow-up points, then, for the impact here. And so while it is true that many of these states are banning access to abortion providers within their borders, I think is the most specific way to phrase that, there are still some legal options available. And so in most cases, or in many cases, pregnant individuals still have access to what we call abortion medication or abortion pills. These are pills that can be ordered. That's not true in all cases. Some states have enacted bans or strict limitations on access for those. The other big option right now is like John mentioned, traveling. And so while there are certainly discussions currently happening about states criminalizing travel across borders to access abortions, that is not something that as yet has been followed by any legislation. That would certainly also be taken up to the Supreme Court and Housai Justice Gorsuch has said that he would not support that kind of ban. And so at least right now, it looks like the Supreme Court wouldn't have the sort of same ruling for something like that, that they did with the existing bans that we're looking at. John, was that a point? I think that was a great point and did you mention that? I forgot to mention that in terms of how this impacts the Republic, from the perspective of future laws, future court opinions, you nailed it. I can't guarantee this, but I guarantee this. States will enact legislation that makes it a felony for you to travel out of that state to another state to get a legal abortion. I can't imagine, I don't care what the court is, I can't imagine a court upholding that. And with Housai Justice Gorsuch saying that he would not support that either, that would lead into the direction that I would think. But again, keep in mind what Justices say and what they do is can be very different through the most recent three. Justices on the court before a Senate subcommittee said that they looked and considered Roe to be settled law and then wrote and then signed off on its complete and total abolition. Okay, sorry, I have one more point. I know we've spent a lot of time here, but leaving and setting aside the sort of, you asked about political impacts, setting aside the personal impacts and there are many. I would also say that legally speaking, politically speaking, this also opens the door for other decisions to be overturned. And so other protections related to the right to privacy are things like the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage. And even Clarence Thomas, Justice Thomas highlighted even the right to private consensual sexual acts between adults as something that could be considered or could be overturned because of this decision. And so this decision as far reaching as its implications are also extends to other issue areas that we've seen either protections for for a long time or protections that we've only seen very recently. Great point, Annie. And again, we're gonna stop talking about this, but that is something I wanna make sure we hit and you did Justice Lido's opinion leaves open the door. You would think philosophically to possibly losing other liberties that fall under substantive new process, anything connected with privacy and you nailed most of them there. Justice Lido does mention, I think, on four separations in detail, passionately. This does not apply to any of the other liberties that are associated with liberty. Again, a number of the justices in the court said they thought Roe was settled law. So you can take that for what you want, but yeah, this does open the door for a number of liberties that we, especially this current generation of your Gen Z, millennial Gen X, we are used to these liberties now and that is potentially open. I'll stop now. So kind of related to this, I mean, first, I guess one other point that might be worth some discussion is not only were we talking about the right to travel and the right to things like plan B and things like that, there's also been some discussion about providing information even about abortion facilities and services and that sort of thing across state lines. So I, for example, I know, this is not an American example, I know that there was a long time in which, for example, it was illegal to provide information about abortion services that were available outside of Ireland to people in Ireland, right? When Ireland had a very strict anti-abortion law or practice in place, right? That eventually was actually found by their Supreme Court, I believe, to be unconstitutional if I'm not mistaken. I could be wrong on that. They might have actually changed that as a constitutional amendment. I'd have to go and re-research that, but I know that was certainly an issue back even into the 1970s, 1980s even. And so there has been, I know, some discussion from some state legislatures, even about, or at least some state legislators, how representative they are, who knows that this is something they might be exploring as a possibility, right? In addition to travel, and there was somebody, I guess, a state legislature in Michigan talking about Plan B, for example, I know. Not too long ago. I guess, getting back to the original question, we talked a lot about the legal implications. What sort of political impact does this seem to be having? We don't normally talk about the political impact necessarily of Supreme Court cases, but this is one that where people do seem to be talking about the political impact a lot more. And I realize this is somewhat speculative, but we do have a midterm election sneaking up on us in almost, just about seven weeks, right? And how does that seem to be playing into perhaps some of the success or not success of the candidates trying to maintain control or take over, particularly in the House of Representatives and the Senate? That's a great question there, and you're right, this is speculative, but I will speculate. This is not good for nationwide. This is not good for the Republican Party. This is the core, one of the core elements of the Republican national platform since 1974, the since that midterm election. Angry, infuriated voters vote way more than passive, happy, hostile voters. If you are passionately, if you view abortion rights, if you don't consider it from the perspective of women's rights, if you view it from the perspective that this is the state sanctioning murder, not just murder, murder of a baby human, that will create a passionate voter. Those voters have succeeded for a half a century of political effort to overturn road that has now occurred. So from a general perspective, if I were a Republican strategist when I read the Dopp's opinion, the official version, not the leak, and the both versions relatively similar, in my private moments, I would be thinking, oh my God, this is going to hurt. This should have been, what's expected to be in November, a massive Republican title wave. It's not, there are four US Senate seats that are competitive, if not leaning to a Democratic candidate that weren't necessarily expected to in 2021. So just in general, I would say this would be advantageous to the Democratic Party across the country. A lot of single issue voters who might line up with the Democratic national platform have never been able to, because of this one issue, hence single issue voter. So the Republican Party has just lost that very important single issue voter. I would, if I was in Vegas, I would say this would be advantageous to Democrats. But Annie? I have, absolutely, I agree with that. And I think that of the people who have sort of these single issue voter perspectives, abortion is the one that seems most common to me. Maybe that's just the people that I speak with. I'll also say that recent polling shows this decision by the Supreme Court as being quite unpopular across the country. And so Pew found that 61% of US adults, that's 80% of Democrats and almost 40% of Republicans actually agreed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. They found that was polling from just before the decision was leaked, probably. And only 37% argued it should be illegal in all or most cases. So this is another way that this decision is very likely to harm the Republican Party. The decision itself is quite unpopular. And so you've got, you've got it sort of harming that party from two different angles. I will also say, we were talking about sort of politically nationally, I think this is gonna be harmful and we've seen this as being harmful internationally as well for the United States reputation. If you look at international law and international perspectives around abortion, at least three, these are just the three that I'm aware of, but there are approximately nine four human rights treaties housed at the United Nations and at least three and three of the most popular treaty bodies, the sort of monitoring bodies for these treaties have come out saying that it is breaking these principles, these protections to ban abortions. And so for the committee against torture, they have said that an abortion ban constitutes torture of individuals who are or can get pregnant. The committee on the elimination of discrimination against women has said similar things. They say it amounts to gender discrimination and the committee on the rights of the child has also come out very strongly against total abortion bans. And so internationally speaking, the United States doesn't always ratify these treaties but there is some international pressure to not adopt bans in particular and to maintain some protections. And so reputationally, this is not a great look for the United States. And one other element there, we have some evidence so we know Kansas, I've almost forgot. Kansas is a strong, solid Republican state as a red state. After Dobs, there was an effort, a statewide vote to constitutionally in terms of the Kansas constitution ban abortions. And with a massive voter turnout, I think that's the biggest element here. The voter turnout in Kansas for this was overwhelmingly higher than normal. Kansas voted no when given the opportunity to vote for a constitutional amendment, the state of Kansas banning abortion, they said no. So that's an anomaly that I think we'll keep watching as November approaches. Okay, yeah, definitely. So yeah, that's a good point particularly about the Kansas vote, where we have the first real evidence of kind of a direct referendum type response where I believe that the exact thing when issue was trying to overturn a state Supreme Court decision that basically legalized abortion or limited the ability of the legislature to regulate abortion. Speaking of Dobs, not to beat Dobs completely to death, but nonetheless, we do have one more kind of broad question about Dobs and that is something you both have kind of alluded to and I've alluded to, and that is that this is not the first time we've seen a majority opinion in the Dobs case back several months ago. I can't remember when it was January, February, something like that. It seems longer ago, there probably was actually. There was a leaked opinion of what turned out to be Justice Alito's majority opinions that people speculate at the time that it wasn't no longer a majority opinion, but apparently it stayed a majority opinion perhaps that's part of the reason why it got leaked is to make sure it stayed a majority opinion. We're not entirely sure, but a draft copy of that opinion was leaked to the press. How come on our leaks like this from the Supreme Court and where do we stand in terms of the investigation into that leak and perhaps even punishing the individual or individuals responsible? I'll hit the first part of that. That does not happen. To my knowledge, this literally has not happened and I mean not happened in the history of the Republic. The court is overwhelmingly, I don't want to say secretive, but I'm going to use the word secretive. The court, unlike the other two elected branches, they are not open and they actually have congressional exceptions to things like the Freedom of Information Act. There are many reasons for that. You do not want the court to be forced on a day-to-day basis to explain to the world where they are on a particular opinion. Again, as we said earlier, court opinions are ever evolving until they are finally published. So there are a lot of reasons why you don't want the court to have to have total transparency with the public. So this is the first time I've ever heard of an actual leak from the court. Having said that, I think the reason for it was because of the overwhelming importance of this, century plus constitutional liberty established before I was born that the majority of our population, women, biological women have become used to as part of their expectations of life. And I think it was the significance of this opinion that led someone to do it. In terms of the investigation, I am assuming it will find nothing. If it would have, it would have. I don't know, if you knew more about the current events on the investigation. So I did look and everything, even there are a couple of articles from this month and they suggested that comments from the justices said that we would hopefully have a report soon. And so nothing inclusive has been found yet. I will make a couple of follow-up points. The leak happened in May. It was actually May 2nd that political leaked the draft. It certainly feels like it was much further away than that much longer ago, but it was just a few weeks before the actual opinion came down. And I will say there have been leaks of information from the Supreme Court before. And so especially, maybe not recently, but decades ago, I don't remember the year, there was at least one case where the majority vote was leaked twice in a row. And so there's been information that has leaked from the courts before. We have never seen a majority opinion like this whole draft leaked before. This is just an extraordinary circumstance. And it has had a massive impact on sort of morale of the court, on the public's judgment of the court. There have been interviews with the justices since then showing that they are having a hard time working with each other and trusting each other. Thomas gave a speech suggesting almost explicitly that he's lost all trust or faith in the court, particularly the Chief Justice, which was more of an illusion than an explicit statement. And then sort of anonymous sources close to the justices have described the current climate around the court as being sort of terrified, especially from the clerks. They're very scared of the investigation of what it means and of what the outcome of it will be. And so the court right now is in a serious period of upheaval because of this particular leak. Great, so yeah, so definitely a lot to be seeing there and a lot to, well, pondering going forward, particularly as far as how it might affect how the court goes about making decisions in the future. It seems to me perhaps that the likelihood is, as John was saying, the court is very secretive and I would suspect that rather than open things up more, I think this is probably on pushing them in the opposite direction to be even more secretive, at least for a while. So we've spent about 30 minutes on dobs. So not to say that we shouldn't spend 30 minutes on dobs because it was an important case, but we also have a bunch of other important cases, well, perhaps to talk about as well. We actually had a question in the chat about the Second Amendment and cases related to that. And so this is a good point for us to actually transit to the next question that we'd already kind of thought about talking about, which is to deal with a case out of New York. So one of the cases also came out in June, was the Supreme Court's opinion in New York State Rifle and pistol versus ruin, believe it or not, I was saying that right, which was a case actually related to gun licensing, concealed carry and things like that, permits in the state of New York. So how did this decision affect states' rights or powers to regulate firearms? And where does that sort of fit into more general sort of framework in terms of the Second Amendment and regulating firearms? We had a question from the chat from a charity who was asking about kind of, has there been a support where the Supreme Court had to limit the Second Amendment rights to limit brutality and violence and things like that? So I think that ties in nicely with this question. Great question. I'll jump on that. We just finished covering this in class. This is an oversimplification, but not really in terms of the Second Amendment politically, socially, philosophically, from the perspective of public health, it's controversial over 30,000 dead Americans per year, constitutionally to the Supreme Court in the history of its jurisprudence. The Second Amendment is just not that controversial. There's one opinion that I would say you need to know. And that occurred in our lifetimes. When you look at DC versus Heller, the late Justice Scalia definitively answered the only real philosophical question we could have about the Second Amendment. If you read the second part of the Second Amendment, pretty simple, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed. But the first part, which used to be considered very important, makes references to well-regulated militias and being necessary for the security of a free state. You could make an intellectual argument that the Second Amendment is connected to military service, to military training, at least do some kind of state or government training program so that average people who know nothing about handling weapons like me, do we actually have access to the Second Amendment, to guns, that question, that debate, raged on for decades until DC versus Heller. That's the big one. Where Justice Scalia said, the right to bear arms is an individual right, not predicated on military service. And, and he said this with equal enthusiasm, government can regulate that right. That's basically it. Do we have an individual right to bear arms? Yes. Can the government regulate it? Yes. In a way, you're all now Second Amendment case law experts. Having said that, not discounting the fact that now it has been applied to the states through the due process clause, the 14th Amendment in Chicago's opinion, this is a big opinion. Having already established it, guns, and this is important for anyone who needs to hear it, your guns, your Second Amendment rights are protected. They're as protected as the First Amendment. Anyone that might feel like the government is perpetually incoming to get them, you're just wrong. You're worrying about nothing. The Second Amendment is incredibly protected by the DC opinion. That would make some ask, well, where to go from here? Well, in terms of that regulation, the Justice Scalia's opinion in DC versus Heller was clear, states can regulate, the federal government can regulate that right. But what New York and five other states were doing and had been doing it in New York's case for over a century, the regulation of firearms, specifically related to concealed firearms, was quite strict, not just strict. It was basically impossible to get one, particularly in, say, if you're in lower Manhattan, you're not getting a concealed carry permit under the prior laws. What we see in the New York state rifle and pistol opinion is a court being asked to states like New York and five others, Massachusetts, California, New Jersey was one. Six states used what we generally refer to as May issue requirements. New York required, and this dates back to a law that goes back to the early 20th century, over 100 years, New York required you to carry a concealed permit. You needed to get a permit from the government and you had to show proper calls. That turned out to be almost practically impossible. These May issue states, that May issue is an important phrase. May issue you a concealed weapon. They may not, and in New York's case, they really didn't. And there were a lot of examples of people who had extensive training with firearms. Or in this case, someone who had a lot of evidence about violent criminal activity that he was experiencing. He wanted a concealed carry permit to protect himself. This goes to the federal court, this particular court. Again, being the most ideologically, most conservative court of generations, had one question. Is the state of New York and five others, are they regulating a little bit too much in a way that is threatening and violating the Second Amendment riot of Americans in New York to bear arms? And the court said definitively, yes they are. The court's opinion here basically prohibits May issue states and everyone has to be what 44 or 45 other states already were and that's shall issue states. Much, much easier to get a concealed carry permit from the government. On that note, that means basically that it will be exponentially easier and you will probably see a lot more people in lower Manhattan who have concealed carry permits because the state can no longer refuse them. The implications of that, we'll see. And there are a number of troubling possibilities. But from the constitutional Second Amendment riot of Americans to bear arms, this opinion gave you exponentially more rights to bear arms or better yet limiting the state's ability to regulate that in a way that kept you from getting concealed carry permits. On that note, I'm gonna stop there almost arbitrarily and hand it over to anyone else who'd like to talk. A couple of follow-up points on that. So absolutely pre-bruin, this case, color was the case to know. This case did actually strike down the legal tests established by Heller. And so we have replaced that test now with a historical tradition requirement for regulations. The quote here is that the government must affirmatively prove that its firearms regulation is part of a historical tradition to set boundaries on gun use. And historical tradition is a favorite phrase of the current court that we will hear multiple times today in a variety of contexts. And so that's a sort of up and coming, you can't call it a legal test, legal standard, I suppose, for determining if these kinds of regulations or government actions are acceptable. Speak a little bit too very briefly to charity's question about limiting violence and murder and brutality. What this case does, what Beroen does is it does actually explicitly prohibit considering the real world effects of gun regulations like violence in establishing constitutionality. And so that is, they can't anymore or won't or have declared that no courts can. And so the answer to your question is no, at this point, the violence cannot be considered in determining if a regulation should or should not be allowed. That's an interesting statement there by the court. And thank you for pointing that detail out, violence not being able to be used as a variable to determine whether government can regulate. I guess, Harold, the second amendment is very protected. Okay, great. So let's see, where are we next? So we're about halfway through and we're getting some questions that do with some new cases as well as some older ones. So we may just need to skip around a little bit. So let's see, are the upcoming cases? Well, let's all throw this out to the floor or to you two, are there any particular cases coming up that maybe one or two that you think are particularly important beyond or sorry, that have already been, let me rephrase that. Okay. So we have one more case that we had on the list that Kenny versus Bremerton did. Either of you wanna talk very briefly about that one or do you wanna just kind of skip ahead to the new stuff? I'm open for either. I've got an idea on the important ones coming up, in my opinion. Any, I didn't wanna jump up here if you wanted to go first or else I will. Go ahead. Yeah, I didn't know if either of you were particularly wedded to Bremerton or... Yep, Bremerton's huge ish. From the perspective of the court's jurisprudence on establishment clause and free exercise, and speech, a lot going on here. The court for decades for generations really has been struggling with the interpretation of the establishment clause, prohibiting the government from respecting the establishment religion, how to interpret the free exercise clause. Over the last generation, political ideological conservatives slash predominantly Republican Party advocates have been pushing the first amendments freedom of speech to further what they once used free exercise to argue for. A lot is going on here in the case involving prayer. So the court is further evolving in its interpretation of how we can or cannot protect free speech. So to make a short story long, we have a high school coach. That is a government employee. And at the end of high school football games, he would go to the 50R line and he would say a silent prayer to himself. Now, right there, this will show you the complexity of religious freedom in this country. Americans, do we have a right to say a silent prayer? Basically wherever we want, it's a silent prayer. So can we say prayers? Of course, the free exercise clause, but it's a government employee. If hundreds or thousands of people are watching a government employee, in this case, a high school football coach, praying at the 50R line after a game, that's a government employee. Does that naturally suggest government endorsement of religion? This is the tricky part. And the court here aired on the side of free exercise and free speech. A high school football coach, again, a government employee, praying at the 50R line, many had a problem with that. The case itself is interesting. There are examples of regardless of the way the case ends or how the opinion is written, there are certain cases that just don't have really that many bad guys. This is someone who's doing what he thinks he's doing privately. He's not advocating or telling people to come pray with him. He's not grabbing players. The school board, being afraid of this, thinking that's endorsement of religion, that makes sense as well. So he's eventually not necessarily fired. His contract wasn't renewed. So I guess you could call that fired. Takes this to the federal Supreme Court. And the court has asked this complex question. Even as a government employee, do you have a right to freely exercise your religion? Or if you want to consider it speech, this court, again, the most conservative court in generations went in the direction of his right to pray. There's several tests that the court uses. If the government is suspected of, say, violating the free exercise of religion, the court will ask itself, basically, is the policy that the government is enforcing, is it neutral? If it's a neutral, generally applicable law that accidentally infringes upon free exercise. In many instances, the court will let that go. Is it a neutral law that furthers a government interest, a legitimate government interest? In this case, the court said no. First and foremost, the school district was very specific. They were not rehiring this coach because of his prayer. Also, neutrality, the court found this was not a neutral application of the law. Has anyone, if anyone's ever been to a football game, a high school game, or heard of football at the end of the game, you will notice that a lot of the coaches will kind of meander around, talk to friends, talk to family, maybe check their cell phones, check ESPN, see other scores. These other coaches were clearly allowed to have a moment of private time, even though they were government employees. But the head coach in his private time was saying a prayer. So all of these factors led the court to its particular opinion. You could also look at this as the court did from the perspective of free speech. The court has tests for free speech as well. When the court is dealing with a government employee, they've long since recognized that your free speech as a person in this country can be truncated as a government employee. But they ask, are you being viewed through this speech as someone who is speaking for government? In that case, you have very little free speech rights. And the court said this is not the case. He was taking a moment as many other coaches were privately praying. They also asked if it's not something that's gonna be viewed as government speech, then we're gonna bring back strict scrutiny and probably not allow it. This is one of those opinions I could continue going for. So overall, the court was asked, can a public school employee head coach have a silent prayer at the 50 yard line after a game? Keep in mind over time, many players started joining him. People from the fans started, it became something of a public event. And the court aired on the side of speech and free exercise. In terms of implications moving forward, what does this mean? I'm sure we'll see at some point, not necessarily a test case, but at some point is someone that is not from, well, just statistically in this country, if you see someone that's, for example, if a head football coach lays out a prayer rug and faces it for Mecca and has a quick relatively silent prayer, will the population respond the same? It won't matter. The court's opinion is pretty clear. You can do that for the most part. I'll turn that over to Annie if you want to fill in any blanks there from Remerton. Sure, so especially speaking to your last point there about it growing over time, this case was really interesting to me because usually with Supreme Court cases, we don't see as much quibbling about the facts of the case. Those are typically seen as being resolved by the time cases get that high. And so even when we talk about oral arguments before the court, most of that time is taken up by Q&A. And so the justices will be asking the legal teams to answer questions, clarifying questions about the legal aspects, but not about the facts that much. Everybody knows the facts. With this case in particular, there are some disputes over maybe not the facts exactly, though that's part of it, but also the facts that matter. And so particularly in the majority of people highlighted over and over again was this one person's right to silently pray in sort of a public form. What the dissenting justices highlighted was what John mentioned there at the end was that this wasn't actually, especially by the end, this was not one person praying silently. This was over time after, and not even a long period of time, after a few games, players started asking to join the coach. This grew, it sort of ebbed and flowed. He started giving motivational speeches that included prayer and religious content. And there were some reports from students of feeling pressured to join. They were afraid that if they did not join, it would hurt their play time. And so that's a very different consideration than one person very quietly and privately and silently praying somewhere during a specific span of time. Now you're getting this sense of pressure from a government employee to participate in a religious activity. And so the dissenting justices really picked up on that aspect of it, whereas the majority justices focused more on that sort of individual right to private contemplation. The second part of this, and this gets a little bit to John Walsh's question from the chat, John asked if this case was the final blow to the lemon test. And for those of you who are familiar with the lemon test, this was the legal test to establish if government activities were breaking the establishment clause or not. And John named some of the steps. It had to have a compelling state interest. It had to be mostly neutral, these kinds of things. And the answer is yes, this was the death blow to the lemon test. And I think it was Gorsuch again, wrote the majority opinion for this one. He used my favorite phrase from before. He explicitly replaced the lemon test. He said it had, we had been hearing its death knells for decades and replaced it with a consideration of historical practices and understandings. And so the lemon test is now dead as well and replaced with this idea of historical understandings. John? Great points. I would gently disagree, but in a fun way, with the lemon test being dead because it has been dead so many times since it has been ignored so many times. It has been outright ignored. It has been playfully slash aggressively insulted by so many core opinions. The essence of lemon is that it's trying to operationalize a list of rules for something that cannot have a list of rules. Free exercise is just too difficult. You have a religious population, you have secular government. How can you create a checklist that you can use every single time to perfectly analyze government involvement religion and checking if it is or is not constitutional? Think of, is the government's function, whatever it may be, whatever we're looking at, government involvement with religion, is it a secular purpose? Okay, that makes sense. Does it advance or inhibit religion? Okay, again, I can make that make sense. Does it foster excessive government entanglement with religion? That's much more of a gray area. The essence, those three points, I don't know how you could necessarily throw those in the trash and literally never consider them again. Is it a secular purpose? How can that ever be gone? Maybe the name, the lemon test, possibly be used less often, but the variables involved in the lemon test, I don't know how they would ever or if they ever could possibly be gone from the court's thought process. Again, but you are right. Technically, it's dead. I would never have argued that it was a strong test to begin with. In my class, when we talk about civil liberties, this is one of the tests we talk about. And so does something have a secular purpose? There is an argument you can make for pretty much any activity. But is this the formal legal test anymore? No, it's been replaced by historical practices and understandings, which I think it's safe to say is just as weak and quibbly as the lemon test before it. I would argue measuring unmeasurable things is my specialty. And so I would not argue that we should move away from at least attempting to protect people, to protect rights just because we think it's hard. We just haven't done a great job of it yet. It would be my sort of hard line stance on that. I completely agree. I don't wanna point out again, everything I just said was not advocating the lemon test. It's just from the court's history. It's beaten and battered and thrown around so much and it has a tendency of being used by the court whenever it pleases the court to do so. Whatever the majority opinion is, if the lemon test works, trust me, they're going to reference it. I would say. But again, I'm not advocating lemon test. It's a tricky test that has a lot of problems. Absolutely. Sorry. Annie, go ahead, yeah. Oh, I was just going to bring up, I think that's Casey, your case or Casey in the chat box asked if that means that government officials don't have free speech or if it's just having to do with religion. In this case, they upheld this government employees' right to both. By establishing the new test, they said that these requirements from the Bill of Rights for freedom of speech and for freedom of religion were no longer sort of in competition with each other. And so they upheld these protections for this particular government official and for cases moving forward, presumably. Yeah, that's a good point. I think that, I mean, we can spend an entire hour and a half on just the right of free speech of government employees as three government employees ourselves, who probably are at the end of the spectrum of government employees who have free speech, nonetheless. Nonetheless, there are some things we would be inappropriate for us to say in class, right? And so there aren't as many as there would be for say somebody that works at the driver's license bureau, but nonetheless, because the nature of our jobs, our nature of our jobs requires us to have some free speech that to express our own personal views at times that we wouldn't necessarily do if we were stamping passports or something. So, and where that intersects with religion and where free, I think the thing with the lemon test is, the lemon test is trying to, well, when we talk about religious freedom, right? We've got the establishment clause, we've got the free exercise clause. And the problem with the lemon test is always that it's trying to negotiate that frontier between establishment and free exercise, right? Where when is the establishment sort of starting to infringe on other people's ability to practice their own religion and that sort of thing. When are people being coerced into religious practice almost, right? And so that's where I think a lot of people found lemon unsatisfactory is that, well, partially because it came out of cases that are kind of irrelevant in a lot of ways to a lot of the sort of debates we have about religion and public life these days. I mean, a lot of it had to do with like parochial schools and things like that and whether you could buy textbooks for a Catholic high school and cases that are kind of, I mean, the fact patterns are very narrow and that sort of thing. And so trying to come up with kind of a general rule that's going to apply to these very narrow fact patterns is just something of a challenge and the fact that the court is never, lemon is one of those kind of insidious baseball things but it's almost, it's probably the test that probably got repudiated the quickest after it was advanced in the sense that, I mean, already you're getting into, soon after lemon you're getting into cases that, or say, well, no, it's really about neutrality. It's about not too long after lemon, right? And so it's just like the court has been, struggling dirt on lemon ever since but nonetheless, as John says, that they bring it back just to beat on it some more or occasionally to say, hey, there are some good ideas in here but still might endorse it, right? We're gonna do the lemon test but we're not gonna call it the lemon test. Yeah, that's a popular one the court likes to use. That was more of a favorite of Justice Kennedy, right? One of his favorite things was to come out, bring back tests but not actually call them the test they were but that's very inside baseball but I don't know if that maybe just some of the Justice don't like the idea of tests at all. And so maybe that's what's going on here. I don't know. Let's see, so let's see. We had a question in the chat about a future case. I think this was a future case. No, this was a past case, a case for the past term. So we keep talking about case for past term but nonetheless, here's a past case. We have a question about Vega vs. Teco. So this was a case that dealt with the Miranda warning and public officials liability for failure to deliver the Miranda warning, getting into some of those questions about sovereign immunity and things like that. Although I don't think sovereign immunity came up quite directly in this case or qualified immunity. What on earth is this case about? And what sort of impact is it likely to have given that it seems like basically you can't sue a cop if he fails to give you your Miranda rights? This is an interesting case involving several Liberty protections. In general, we have a gentleman, Mr. Teco, who is a nurse in California. He's accused of sexually assaulting a patient. The sheriff's department is called. The sheriff sent the deputy to the hospital and they start asking him questions. He eventually admits to doing what he was accused of doing. He asks for forgiveness. He is without necessarily being aware. He's under investigation the moment the deputy sheriff starts talking to it. The deputy sheriff does not Mirandize him. He does not inform him of the constitutional rights and he basically confesses, this becomes a key element later in trial. The first trial actually ended in a missed trial. The second trial he was acquitted and then he sues the officer. This brings up a lot of different points. What I'll focus on is the course answer to the following question. If you are not properly Mirandized, does that represent necessarily a violation of your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent? Or as the court would say, I'll give the results here right now, is the Miranda warning established in Miranda versus Arizona, is it simply a prophylactic tool used by the court to protect constitutional liberties? In other words, does a tool created by the court to protect the constitutional liberty, does it share the same significance of the constitutional liberty itself? Hopefully that made sense. And the court says, no, no, it does not. There are a number of other landmark opinions of the court that get involved with the ability or mostly the inability of actually suing a federal or state bureaucrat in the course of their duties in general. If you can show that a government official, in this case, a deputy sheriff intentionally, knowingly violated your constitutional liberties, that does open that individual up to potential litigation or a suit. But here the court is predominantly answering, again, multiple ways you can look at this case, depending on who you are or what you walk away from. Does a tool used to protect the constitutional liberty share the same significance as the constitutional liberty itself? And the court is saying, no, among other things. I'll stop there in case anyone else has any points. I have thoughts. I don't know if I have coherent points per se. I think with this one, John has done a great job explaining the majority perspective. And so I think that hearing the dissenting perspective is also very important here. And so what you saw was the three liberal justices, writing the dissenting opinion, written by Justice Kagan, who argued that Miranda, Miranda writes, are secured by the constitution. If you look at other cases that the court has decided, in this case, she particularly cited not the Miranda case itself, but the Dickerson v. United States case and wrote that because of the court's sort of previous rulings in this area, they have established this connection with our constitutional rights, the method it should be upheld. So that's the sort of legal perspective here. The other side of this is that the court established this, whether they established it as a tool or established it as a right, they did establish it. And what this ruling or opinion suggests is kind of awkward, really, when it comes to enforcing their opinions, when it comes to enforcing their judgments. Because what they're saying is that, yes, it matters and this should be used, but also it's fine if you don't, which is not a stance that you would hope that the highest court in the land is going to take to the law. Like, yes, you have these rights, they should be protected. We have established a very clear-cut path for doing so, but we will not prosecute or penalize anyone who fails to do so. Then it's not a right, it's not, well, that's not true. It is not a protected right, it is not a guaranteed or realized right or an enjoyed right. So they have kind of kicked the protections for this out from underneath it without sort of coming out and saying it. Great summary there. I think the importance of this opinion lies in what it might have started and we won't know that until the future. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, I think the A's make a great point there, right? You're almost cutting yourself off at the knees, right? You're basically saying, okay, well, Mr. President, you don't even have to try to enforce this, right? It's like, okay, well, I guess if you're, as we sometimes talk about how Supreme Court justices are strategic and how they think through cases, things like that, it would seem to me that whether you're liberal or conservative or whatever, this would not be a strategic choice regardless of your ideology, right? Conservatives are gonna want to enforce their rulings at some point, right? Liberals are going to want to enforce their rulings at some point, right? And so basically saying, oh, you know, executive branch, you can do whatever the heck you want, particularly state executive branches, you can do whatever the heck you want. Does not strike me as a particularly strong signal to be sending them, you know, maybe if it was, maybe if they were in a situation where, okay, they were getting run, rush out over already anyway, maybe you sort of can see that, but it's like, okay, well, you know, I don't know, it just seems to me like it's unnecessary, right? I guess, and this distinction between, well, it's a right, but the versus, well, it's a procedure to guarantee a right. Again, you know, as Annie and John suggest, I'm not sure that's really a distinction. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. It's like I could have the right to remain silent, but I don't have the right to be informed that I have the right to remain silent. But I do have that right, but if they don't do that right, then that's not as important as having the right. Yeah, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that one. Yeah. Just to clarify, and the confusion y'all are identifying is definitely there. This is a peculiar opinion. I want to bring us back. I don't know if I stressed this earlier. At the end of the day, we are dealing with the ability of a civilian to sue a government employee through a federal law from 1983 that deals with when you can and cannot sue a bureaucrat in government. And again, paraphrasing, if that government official has shown a deliberate purposeful, they absolutely know what they're doing and they are violating your civil liberties. That's a bureaucrat that you will probably be able to successfully sue. Fundamentally, the question is this, does a, I'll call it a mistake, a problem or completely ignoring the Miranda rule, does that constitute a knowing purposeful violation of your liberty on the part of the government bureaucrat that would then open them up to that suit? That's another key element here that the court is saying, no, it doesn't. Yeah, I guess you could read this sort of as a broader piece, perhaps with the qualifying immunity question in general, right, where the court's been pretty hostile towards arguments against qualified immunity, right, where people try to say, okay, well, you know, this government official shouldn't be doing whatever. And so maybe if you look at from that perspective, maybe it makes more sense, I don't know. And as a government employee who does not want to be sued, maybe I like qualified immunity a lot, I don't know. Particularly as an administrator, but that's a whole different story. Because I don't wanna talk about that. But in all seriousness, changing gears a little bit. So we had a kind of broad question from the chat from Kailin or CJ, could there be a change where just, if just enough happened, no, let me rephrase this, could there be a change where if just enough votes happened in the Supreme Court, could it change all the work on the amendments like banning or limiting more rights? I guess what he's getting at is, you know, what scope does the Supreme Court have to effectively reinterpret or change how the constitution is interpreted in practice? You know, are there any limits to this? Are there any limits to the ability of the court to say, well, we're going to just interpret the second amendment this way or that way or that sort of thing? For just in general, for what are the limits? Yeah. If it involves a civil liberties issue, a possible government violation of constitutionally guaranteed liberties, there are, the court has expansive power. The birthed from Marbury versus Madison and it is in a way convenient that the court gave itself this grand power of judicial review. But there's a lot of arguments that can be made that all of the framers were aware of this and they recognized that Article III, right now is pretty easy to get ratified. If we throw judicial review in there as a specific term, maybe we have to stay in Philadelphia a little longer. The point being this expansive power, the limits that I would identify, I think we've mentioned already, there's the court has no enforcement capability. The court has no aircraft carrier groups or army battalions. The court relies on the executive branch and the legislative branch to enforce its rulings as well as state governments. They have lifetime appointments. They can be impeached, but in general, they don't necessarily have anything to do with the same political pressures that the elected branches have. That's a huge question and I'm hesitant to say their power is extraordinary. If it's a constitutional issue, the court, the federal Supreme Court is the final decision, except for when it's not. Congress has extraordinary power. Not that they use this a lot. They have, but not much. They can adjust the appellate jurisdiction of the court. Congress can pass a law that strips the federal Supreme Court of its appellate jurisdiction over the First Amendment. They wouldn't do that, but they could. So technically that's the limitation. So I'm gonna stop here with what are the limits on the federal Supreme Court's ability to interpret the Constitution. There are not that many philosophically. In terms of reality, again, they can't enforce what they say. Public opinion can't drive them, but it does. Annie? I think this is the danger in having a supermajority on the court as well. Is that when you have numbers that are closer together, say you've got like a 50-50 split and one person in the middle, the floats either direction, what you get is less change over time, probably. Whereas a supermajority on the court has a lot of power. And so you're likely to see change in one position sort of over and over again. And that's what we're seeing right now. The court's decision to overturn Roe and Casey is a massive one. And that is an outcome of the supermajority. A lot of the rulings that are coming down that I looked at for today, those were rulings that were decided on a six-three basis. It was the six conservative justices versus the three liberal justices. And so that is while the justices themselves are technically supposed to not be on the ideological spectrum or be using the ideological spectrum to inform their legal perspectives they're supposed to be embedded in the constitution, that is just not the reality that we operate under. And so sort of in addition to, they have a great deal of power, they have even more power when you see more justices representing one side of the spectrum of the other. That's a good point. And one thing I'd add is, I mean, I think that idea of the supermajority is not something until, right, in our lifetime it's not something we're used to. I think probably the historical closest period to that might be the warning court where you had kind of this very long string of very liberal rulings and what you ended up with was political backlash to it. Congress coming in and trying to reign in decisions like map versus Ohio and a lot of those other sort of cases where the spring court was fastly expanding civil liberties. And so the lesson from that is perhaps that, there's kind of an equilibrium that kicks in where the political branches kind of move against that if it becomes extreme, I guess, or a pattern, right, where one side is consistently winning and one side is consistently losing. And particularly the one side that's winning is not the one that has the popular majority. And so, and the same thing you argue about, say the spring court in 1930s, right, with the cases that led up to the switch in time at the same time, right. The same sort of thing where you have a court that's out of step with certainly the majority of Congress at the time that kind of moves in a different direction. So yeah, that's a good question going forward is how sustainable is this before something like, well, again, ideas like court packing and things like that come on the table is a good question. We have a specific question about a specific case. A lot of people have some specific questions about specific cases, well, surprisingly, specifically doing with, whether I can say the word specific a lot more times, but more specifically, particularly, not specifically, the case of Moore versus Harper, which is what I thought, would have thought was a fairly obscure case, but not only was it on our list of things to talk about, somebody in the chat actually wants to talk about it too. So what is the Moore versus Harper case that's gonna be up before the spring court about? And how might it affect congressional and presidential elections going forward if the court were to entertain what the petitioners want here? I would argue this is one of the most important opinions that we have along with Merrill, which they're the same, but they're different. Great points were just brought up. We are in a different time. This court is special and I do not mean special, good or bad. Traditionally, the court is a more conservative branch, but Chris brings out a great point. The Warren court was the most ideologically liberal court we've had, but there was a slow transition from Warren to Berger or Rehnquist or Roberts. So we've experienced whether we recognize it or not with the Supreme Court. I don't wanna just look at the Supreme Court. The lower courts are very important. 96% of the time, whatever the law of the land is, it was the circuit courts that decided it, but we can underestimate the importance of President Donald Trump having access to three Supreme Court appointees and also who was he replacing? He wasn't replacing conservatives. He wasn't replacing liberals. So we look at the end of the Obama administration. We had eight justices. There was an extraordinary earthquake in the court that has led to what Annie brought up this super majority. So times this last session and what's coming in the future are interesting. We will continue to go into interesting times because what this court says, it's probably gonna stand. There are a lot of young justices on the court. Having said that, with regard to Morvey Harper, this has to do with gerrymandering. We have not yet gotten to this in my classes. So very quickly, gerrymandering is the art slash nightmare of state governments drawing congressional districts after a constitutionally required census in a way that is advantageous to one party, specifically that's partisan gerrymandering. Now partisan gerrymandering can be taken to the extent that it really starts to threaten the principles of democratic theory itself. If you have, for example, a state like, I don't know, North Carolina, where if you look at the statewide vote of all 14 house districts, United States House of Representatives, state of North Carolina has 14 districts, if for argument's sake, the popular total vote of that state, North Carolina, is pretty close. Let's call it 50-50. In the past it has actually leaned a little bit in Democrat. If the overall statewide vote, which technically doesn't count, but we can add so we can come up with it, if the statewide vote's basically 50-50 and you have 14 congressional districts, if you were in Vegas, what would you bet the representation would come out as? Obviously, it might be close to 7-7. Mathematically, that would make sense. The state of North Carolina is closer to 10-4, Republican to Democrat. Both political parties will partisan gerrymander, but in this case, we're dealing with the Republican legislature. The problem we have is there is a danger to partisan gerrymandering. There's a danger to politicians selecting their voters as opposed to voters selecting their politicians. That makes us question, what does representative government really mean? The federal Supreme Court you would think could possibly step in and fix this problem. But not only a couple of years ago, the Roberts Court gave the issue of partisan gerrymandering the death knell. They recognized it as a political question. We'll cover this in class, we're running out of time. If the court considers an issue, a political question, that means they want the elected branches to figure it out themselves. Electrical issues have long since been considered that. It wasn't until the 1960s in Baker versus Carr, we'll talk about that later, where the court decided that they would no longer look at malapportionment as a political question. Short story, even longer. Supreme Court has very clearly said, partisan gerrymandering is a political question. We are not gonna fix it. Very long opinion that explained Roberts argument. We have in Moore v. Harper, we have the state of North Carolina's Supreme Court trying to protect the voters from partisan gerrymandering. We have a Republican legislature in North Carolina that is arguing, we have the power to do this. The constitution gives state governments the power to control most of the realities of elections, time, place and manner, particularly those for Congress. Now, Congress does have the power to overrule state governments constitutionally. What North Carolina's legislature is saying is that we are the exclusive branch of the state government for identifying what will or will not be the political realities of elections in this state. Supreme Court is saying, no, you are violating the North Carolina state constitution. This, as you call independent state legislature theory is not well supported. The state of North Carolina's legislature is saying, we're the legislature, we are the ultimate power on the realities surrounding voting in the state of North Carolina. And that's it. The state Supreme Court is saying, actually you have literally passed laws saying that the state Supreme Court of North Carolina should be able to and past to stop partisan gerrymandering. Hopefully this is all making sense because while the federal Supreme Court has said, partisan gerrymandering is a political question, we're not gonna touch it. Morvey Harper is the state Supreme Court of North Carolina trying to fix it. In addition, not that we'll have time, but Merrill v. Milligan, we go to Alabama. The Seventh Congressional District of Alabama is obviously partisan gerrymandered. If such a thing even exists, it has to be the Alabama Seventh. There we see a question to the Supreme Court as to whether or not it is violating Title II of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those two cases are shockingly important because we are running out of ways to end partisan gerrymandering. The Supreme Court is out. North Carolina Supreme Court could be out if the Supreme Court says so. And the Voting Rights Act, which has been crippled by the Shelby County Beholder opinion could be crippled even further in the Alabama opinion. So this upcoming docket is so unimaginably important regarding the realities of true representative government in this country, at least with regard to the House representatives. I'm gonna stop there. Went probably a little too far, but I could. Did I even answer the question? I kind of got lost in the actual question. I'm gonna pretend I did. Out of, I don't think I could add anything to John's explanation of Morvey Harper. I would add to his mention of Merrill v. Milligan that we're looking not just at this idea of gerrymandering now and how we manage that, but also the idea of discrimination, racial discrimination in voting practices and policies. And so that's the other really important aspect of this. And Merrill v. Milligan, they're considering section two of title, I believe it's title six of the Voting Rights Act. And so, no, section six of the Civil Rights Act, it's section two of the VRA, there we go. It's been a long day, y'all. But that's the other important aspect of this is that we're not just looking at partisan identification, we're also looking at other really important identities as well. Yeah, and the only thing I would add to that is we have this, as John mentioned, the independent state legislature doctrine idea coming out of Morvey Harper is basically making this kind of a new, as John says, kind of an unusual argument about can the federal government essentially or can the federal constitution essentially delegate some aspect of government to not the states, but one part of the states, right? Cutting out the people of the state, cutting out the executive of the state, cutting out the judiciary of the state, just saying, okay, well, now the kind of argument is, well, it literally says state legislature, right? And if you're a textualist, if you're a literalist, maybe that's appealing, but then again, we see textualism, we see text that isn't read that way in other parts of the constitution. For example, the First Amendment says, Congress shall make no law. Well, we don't just simply say that the First Amendment only applies to Congress, right? It applies to the president, it applies to the courts, it applies to everybody, right? Not just to the house and the Senate, right? So are we taking the constitution here literally or are we taking the constitution to mean, well, okay, well, the state's lawmaking apparatus or the state's procedure for making laws, right? And so now the court a few years ago had a case dealing with impending redistricting commissions where it actually basically already sort of decided this and said that, well, the legislative power of the state isn't just held by the state legislature, right? It could be a held by the people collectively in an initiative or a referendum or something like that. And so what you have in Moore versus Harper is sort of some people trying to sort of thread the needle and figure out how this is different from that case, but nonetheless allow for it. And then you have other people saying, well, you know, the Arizona decision was wrong, right? Which probably wouldn't appeal to some of the people that voted for the Arizona decision on the court. And so it's just kind of a whole can of worms where fundamentally, right, you have this other sort of thing of the federal government really sort of delving into the separation of powers within states. And, you know, particularly when you think about the original sort of conception of the constitution where the, you know, the states are kind of sovereign and independent from the national government almost. Well, how can the federal government sort of meddle in the internal sort of operations of how states decide how they're gonna do things, right? And so you're, so in a regional, you can make an originalist argument that when the Constitution said state legislatures, it actually meant the states themselves, right? Through their legislative powers. So how this pans out, who knows how it's gonna pan out? You know, a lot of people have argued this is, you know, kind of a very, very much a reach to try to cut the state spring court out here. But, you know, definitely there are some people that by just accepting the case, you know, they're giving it some oxygen perhaps. So we have more than exceeded our time and probably the patience of our audience and maybe even the patience of my colleagues. I don't know, but, and, you know, I could show everybody the list of all the things we didn't even get close to getting to, you know, a very, very exciting upcoming term. One thing before we adjourn, or a couple of things before we adjourn. First, I should definitely thank our two panelists like Dr. Annie Watson and Dr. John Hall. I'd like to thank them for taking time out of their busy schedules to join me this evening. I'd like to thank all of you for joining us and asking your questions or tuning in in general. If you didn't ask questions, that's fine too. We will, as hopefully you, those of you that are here for extra grant, I imagine most of you are, we will keep a record of who is here for that and make sure that your professors, if there were other professors that brought people, that asked people to join us, I'm sure they'll be in touch as well. And also I just wanted to give a quick plug for our next event coming up in a couple of weeks. We have an elections preview that we're gonna be doing. So some of the more things coming up with the midterms and things like that, because it'll be about just over five weeks from the midterm election, the last week to register to vote. By the way, if you aren't registered to vote, go ahead and register to vote. But kind of tied in with that deadline, we're gonna be doing an elections preview event in a couple of weeks on October 5th. So not the next Wednesday, but two weeks for Wednesday. I beg your professor for extra credit for that too, or not as a case maybe. But thank you all for coming out and look forward to hopefully seeing those of you that are my students in class on Monday and those of you that are not my students. Hope for it. I hope to see you soon at one of our future events and thank you all again.