I'm Elizabeth Slattery 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 new cert grants and opinions and when the government changes its litigation position and we'll interview former assistant to the Solicitor General

Ginger Anders.

So what is happening at SCOTUS this week?

Well, the court granted cert in two new cases, and we're pretty excited about them.

Yeah, listeners should have, we should have recorded our conversation when I called Elizabeth

to yell about the new grants because they were so exciting.

So first up is Gundy v. United States.

The court limited the question presented to whether Congress's delegation of authority to the

Attorney General to issue regulations under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act violates the non-delegation doctrine.

I know that must sound pretty dry, but it's actually a very exciting case.

So Congress did not determine the applicability of Sorna, that's the Sex Offender Registration

and Notification Act, to individuals who were convicted of a sex offense before the law was

passed.

Instead, Congress delegated that determination to the

Attorney General. So was that delegation permissible? Well, going back to a 1928 case, J.W. Hampton,

Jr. and Company v. United States, the Supreme Court said that Congress can delegate some of its

authority to a person or authorized body as long as there was some

sort of intelligible principle.

And the last time the court has invalidated an act of Congress on non-delegation grounds was

in 1935 in two cases involving New Deal era regulations.

So these were the Panama Refining Company and Schechter poultry cases.

...