“Clarence Thomas Unintentionally Opened the Door to a New Type of Affirmative Action”: Law professor Jonathan Zasloff has this Jurisprudence essay online at Slate.

“Senate Judiciary moves SCOTUS ethics bill forward — toward a dim future; Republicans said the entire Democratic effort was an act of retaliation aimed at the high court’s conservative supermajority”: Katherine Tully-McManus and Josh Gerstein of Politico have this report.

“On Centralized and De-Centralized Federal Courts: Constitutional litigation should be more rare, and should involved fully developed and not assumed facts.” George Liebmann has this post at The American Conservative.

“Sonia Sotomayor’s Book Scandal Is Banal and Troubling; The Supreme Court justice’s buckraking hardly compares to that of her conservative colleagues; But it still says a lot about how much Washington has changed”: Walter Shapiro has this essay online at The New Republic.

“Christian baker sued for refusing gender-transition cake says Supreme Court ruling puts law on his side; Jack Phillips was sued again after he won at the Supreme Court, making his court battles stretch out more than a decade”: Brianna Herlihy of Fox News has this report.

“Fresh Fallout From the Supreme Court’s Dobbs Ruling Just Hit Trans People”: Law professor Mary Ziegler has this Jurisprudence essay online at Slate.

“Justice Thomas’s Critics on Affirmative Action Prove His Point”: Missouri Solicitor General Josh Divine has this post at the “Bench Memos” blog of National Review.

“Supreme Court Has Worked on Code of Conduct but Gotten Nowhere; Senate Judiciary Committee approves Democratic-sponsored call for ethics code on party-line vote”: Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal has this report.

“1994 Republican Senate Candidates Fight on Judges; Unlearning the wrong lesson from Judge Bork’s defeat”: Ed Whelan has this post at his “Confirmation Tales” Substack site.

“Influential activist Leonard Leo helped fund media campaign lionizing Clarence Thomas”: Shawn Boburg, Emma Brown,and Ann E. Marimow of The Washington Post have this report.

“Pa. High Court Adopts Per-Defendant Calculation of Punitive-to-Compensatory Damages Ratio”: Aleeza Furman of The Legal Intelligencer has this report on a ruling that the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania issued yesterday.

The decision consists of a majority opinion and four concurring opinions (here, here, here, and here). For those keeping score, that means that only Chief Justice Debra Todd refrained from issuing an opinion in the case.

At “The Volokh Conspiracy,” Eugene Volokh has related blog posts titled “A State Justice Criticizes S. Ct.’s Constitutional Punitive Damages Caselaw” and “More from Pa. S. Ct. Justice David Wecht on Unenumerated Rights.”

“Progressives Should Be Grateful For President Trump’s Not-So-Conservative SCOTUS Picks”: Josh Blackman has this post at “The Volokh Conspiracy,” along with related posts titled “Conservatives Should Not Be Surprised By Justice Gorsuch’s Opinion in Bostock”; “Conservatives Should Not Be Surprised By Justice Kavanaugh’s Voting Pattern With Chief Justice Roberts”; and “Conservatives Should Not Be Surprised By Justice Barrett’s Cautious Approach; Barrett was added to the SCOTUS short-list only seventeen days after she was confirmed to the Seventh Circuit.”

“We Shouldn’t Stop Talking About Justice John Marshall Harlan: Today, historical figures are held in deep suspicion, especially when cited in politics or law; But refusing to acknowledge the heroes of the past diminishes our own sense of what is possible.” Peter S. Canellos recently had this essay online at Politico Magazine.

“Are paid petitions for certiorari in decline — again?” Michael Migiel-Schwartz recently had this post at “SCOTUSblog.”

“Federal court rules in favor of Dante Mullinex’s grandmother in free-speech case”: Mike Argento of The York Daily Record has this report.

Aimee Ambrose of The York Dispatch reports that “Court sides with grandma over D.A. in Dante Mullinix free speech case.”

And at “The Volokh Conspiracy,” Eugene Volokh has a post titled “Grandmother Has Right to Publish Government Documents About Investigation into Grandson’s Death; The Third Circuit holds that, once the government released the documents, it couldn’t then forbid the grandmother (or others) from publishing them.”

You can access yesterday’s ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit at this link.

“The Fourth Circuit Requires a Second Notice of Appeal After the Appeal Window is Reopened; The Fourth Circuit held that once the appeal window is reopened under Rule 4(a)(6), would-be appellants must file a new notice of appeal; A prior one — which the court construed as a Rule 4(a)(6) motion — was insufficient”: Bryan Lammon has this post at his “final decisions” blog about a ruling that a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued Monday.

“Alabama Republicans pitch congressional map with one majority-Black district, even though the Supreme Court mandated two; The state’s GOP-led Legislature has proposed a new map that would still leave Alabama with a single majority-Black district”: Char Adams of NBC News has this report.

“‘The People’s Justice’ Review: The Originalist and the Masses; When we follow the Constitution’s text, a federal judge argues, the weak and the powerless stand to benefit the most.” In today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, David J. Garrow has this review of Sixth Circuit Judge Amul Thapar’s new book, “The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories that Define Him.”