Last week, the Court held a private conference but didn’t issue its regular Friday order list due to the holiday. The last time that happened (Good Friday back in March), the Court decided nineteen new cases the following week.

No promises about this week’s order list.

Articles from the Past Week

• More Election Cases in the Pipeline. Cases in both Fort Worth and Austin district courts raise a question of Texas election law that has tripped up several challengers this year — how far in advance of the election must a challenger quit a government job to avoid violating Texas’s rule against dual office-holding?

• Perils of Fifty-State Surveys: Kennedy v. Louisiana. When declaring that there was a national “consensus” that rape was never appropriate for crimes against individuals that fell short of homicide, the U.S. Supreme Court overlooked a 2006 federal statute that imposed the death penalty for child rape under the UCMJ. The Washington Post has now called for the Court to rehear Kennedy because this kind of error calls the legitimacy of its decision into question.