Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court.

I'm John Carlo Conoparo.

I'm Zach Smith.

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.

Welcome back to SCOTUS 101.

Welcome back indeed.

There's not as many opinions this week as there were last week, but I know one thing for sure, G.C., the next couple of weeks are going to be doozies.

Yeah, no kidding.

Well, I'll start us off with our first opinion of the week, U.S. X-Ral shoot versus supervalue.

This was a unanimous decision by Justice Thomas, where the court held that the scienter,

that is intent, element of the False Claims Act, refers to a defendant's subjective belief,

not what a reasonable person would think.

The False Claims Act forbid someone from knowingly submitting a false claim to the government.

Now, lots of statutes create the right to make claims. The statutes at issue in this case, the Medicaid and Medicare statutes,

allow drug retailers to make claims for their usual and customary drug prices.

The drug retailers here regularly sold their drugs at discount prices, but they billed the

government for the base price. So, was this a knowing falsehood? The lower courts said no, because

reasonable people would think that the base prices were the usual and customary ones.

But the Supreme Court disagreed because what matters is whether the retailer believed that its discount prices were the usual prices.

Next up, we have Glacier Northwest versus Teamsters.

This is an 8 to 1 decision by Justice Barrett, which Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Kavanaugh, joined in full.

The court held that the National Labor Relations Act, the NLRA, does not preempt Glacier Northwest's state law tort claims against a local labor union that went on strike with the alleged intent

...