Hi and welcome to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am Dahlia Lithwick and I cover the court for Slate.

It's been an eventful few days up there at one first street in Washington, D.C., but amid all the big decisions and the non-decions and the sort of decisions coming down from the court, you may have missed a different kind of insider Supreme Court news.

That being that the Solicitor General of the United States, Donald Farrelli, has just stepped down from his job.

And later on in this podcast, we're going to sit down with him on his very last day, Solicitor General, to talk about his time spent arguing on behalf of the American people.

But first, let's turn to at least some of the big action from the court this week.

On Thursday, we got a pair of four four splits into big, big cases, United States versus Texas, the challenge to President Obama's executive

actions on immigration, and also Dollar General, a case about tribal sovereignty on Choctaw

lands.

What that means is that the court has decided not to decide the opinion of the court below

stands, but only in the jurisdiction where it sits.

Perhaps the most surprising decision this week was the 4-3 decision in Fisher v. University

of Texas upholding on its second trip to the Supreme Court, an affirmative action policy

at UT that uses race as a factor in admissions.

Now, three years ago, in a case known as Fisher 1, the court sent this

same case back to the lower court in Texas with instructions to defer less to UT's claims.

But with Elena Kagan recused, and only seven justices left to decide the fate of race-based

affirmative action, on Thursday of this week, the majority decided to allow for at least some consideration of race in university admissions.

This is a disappointing loss for the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, who had argued all along that the UT admissions policy discriminated against her as a white woman in denying her a space at the school.

This case started eight years ago, and it's clear, at least from the majority and dissenting opinions, that the justices are also a little weary.

Joining us to discuss the Fisher decision is Sherilyn Eiffel.

She's president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, or LDF, and they filed an amicus brief in this litigation.

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