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Hi, and welcome to Amicus, Slate's podcast about all things Supreme Courtish.

I am Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's Supreme Court correspondent.

The final oral arguments of the 2015 term wrapped up this week with a high-profile case

involving the former governor of Virginia. Today on the show,

we're going to take a closer look at that case and figure out what's at stake. But before we get

there, a tiny little bit of Supreme Court gossip. No, Merrick Garland has not been given a hearing or a vote,

but he's had an eventful week of courtesy meetings with members of the Senate

and of having his photograph accidentally tweeted by NBC News in a breaking news story

about accused murderer Robert Durst.

Oops.

In other news, the court handed down a decision in a case we discussed a few months ago on the show,

Heffernan v. Patterson. That you may recall is the extremely bizarre case of the New Jersey cop,

who is demoted for exercising speech rights that he only kind of exercised accidentally.

Well, it turns out that what looked to the police department's higher-ups like political activity was just a cop carrying a lawn sign for an election for his elderly mother.

But in a 6-2 ruling this week, the High Court determined that the decision to demote him was, in fact, unconstitutional, even though it was based on a mistaken assumption about his political beliefs.

And now on to Virginia, where the former governor, Bob McDonald, was literally kept out of jail

when the Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal of a public corruption conviction from 2014.

Now, the facts of this case read a little bit like a reality show with the governor

and his wife, Maureen, affording access to a wealthy Virginia businessman in exchange for,

...