I am Dahlia Lithwick, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.

And we are bringing you an opinioninion Palooza special episode.

On Thursday morning, the High Court did a whole bunch of very late spring docket cleaning,

churning out six decisions of which virtually all were unanimous or nearly unanimous,

and one was to note that they were regretful about taking a case.

Now, even though the subjects at hand are big, hot button issues, reverse discrimination,

religious liberty, guns, the opinions were in fact pretty narrow and sober and, dare I say,

kind of humble and minimalist. Mark Joseph Stern is here to talk about some of these decisions and about the court's ability

to play nicely when the occasion requires as much.

Hi, Mark.

Hi, Dahlia.

So let's start maybe with Ames versus Ohio Youth Department.

This is a case about quote-unquote reverse discrimination and the standard of proof that is required by members of a majority group claiming to have been fired in this case for not being gay.

Katanji Brown-Jackson writes on a unanimous opinion for the court saying what?

So Katanji Brown Jackson wrote that even if you are a member of a majority group, you don't face any heightened burden to state a claim of workplace discrimination.

The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held

otherwise. The Sixth Circuit held that if you're a member of a majority group, so if you are

white, if you are a man, if you are heterosexual, you must show background circumstances to

support the suspicion that you faced discrimination, even though you are normally not a victim of

discrimination. You are typically, more frequently, the discriminator. And Justice Jackson said,

nope, that is not the rule. That appears nowhere in the text of Title VII. We are going to overturn

that principle and state that no matter

...