I'm Elizabeth Lattery, and I'm Tiffany Bates.

And welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court,

what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

This week we're talking about the Supreme Court's recent grants and denials,

and we'll interview Chief Judge Stephen Dillard.

We're excited to announce that SCOTUS 101 is now part of the Rurkishay Audio Network. Woohoo. So welcome to all of our new listeners. We hope you'll stick around. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And please rate us if you enjoy listening. So Tiffany, did you see there was a big election this week? I've heard. Yeah. So following the election in Alabama, we've heard some speculation

on Twitter that Justice Anthony Kennedy might consider stepping down before the 2018 election.

Some people are saying that if the Democrats take the Senate, then they might try to hold any

Scotus vacancy open until after the 2020 presidential election. Oh, that's a very long time.

That is a very long time indeed.

I think this just means that Don McGahn needs to, you know, get a judicial nominee for every single vacancy.

And then we need to get them to the Senate before 2018.

So we're going to be keeping a close eye on that situation and we'll report back on any

whisperings that we hear in the wind that Justice Kennedy is in fact thinking about

retiring. Yes. So the Supreme Court issued a bunch of grants and a few

denials this week. Elizabeth, what did they agree to hear? So yeah, the court issued

its last set of regular orders for the year, taking

up six new cases. Some of them are kind of boring. Some of them are moderately interesting,

so we'll run through them quickly. The first is a contracts clause dispute involving a

revocation upon divorce statute. There are two cases involving sentence reduction under the

sentencing guidelines range.

There's an in rem jurisdiction and tribal sovereign immunity case.

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