Hello! And welcome to another edition of the Deadline: Legal newsletter.
Call it the calm before the storm. Heading into Thursday's Supreme Court opinion day, there were 30 cases from the term left to decide and a trove of blockbusters among them, including voting rights and affirmative action. But the three mostly unanimous opinions we received were not the ones most people are waiting on.
One case, however, featured a notable solo dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in the labor case Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters. In a majority opinion by Donald Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, all eight of Jackson's colleagues agreed that a concrete delivery company's lawsuit could proceed against a union for walking off the job with wet concrete still in their trucks. But Jackson wrote a methodical and powerful dissent, explaining why the court had no business intervening at this point in the litigation, and why the majority wrongly sided against the union on the substance of the matter.
Read more of Jordan Rubin's analysis in Deadline: Legal Blog
"Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master," wrote Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee. Expect Jackson to keep dissenting, likely joined by her two fellow Democratic appointees, in crucial cases as the term marches toward its unofficial end in late June. The next batch of opinions could come on Thursday.
Off the court, the Senate Judiciary Committee continues its tepid ethical quest to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas' billionaire benefactor, Harlan Crow. The GOP megadonor received an even more sternly worded letter from the Democratic-led committee after he blew off the last one, giving him a new deadline of June 5 to comply with the committee's request for more information. The committee should get its subpoena pen ready.
And the Trump legal docket moves apace. In his New York state hush money prosecution, the former president is trying to kick the judge off the case and, as MSNBC legal contributor Mary McCord explained on the show, he's trying to move the prosecution to federal court. Meanwhile, special counsel Jack Smith appears to be putting the finishing touches on indictments of his own, at least in the Mar-a-Lago documents probe, one of two Justice Department investigations he's overseeing — the other on efforts to overturn the 2020 election and Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump appeared to panic during a pre-taped town hall with Fox News this week when asked about an audio recording in which he seemed to acknowledge knowingly taking a classified document. According to MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, such evidence could make charges under the Espionage Act all but certain for Trump.
By next week's newsletter, the 2024 Republican candidate could have a federal case pending on his docket.
