I'm Elizabeth Slattery 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, I'm joined by my colleague Jason Sneed, and we'll talk about Ginsburg's triumphant return to the bench, one big SCOTUS decision, and I also recently sat down with the Ninth Circuit's Judge Carlos Baia.

So RBG is back.

She returned to the bench this week for oral arguments after missing the entire January sitting while she recuperated from surgery.

And boy, is she back.

She jumped in asking questions in the first argument of the week in a case called Return Mail Inc.

versus U.S. Postal Service, which deals with the Postal Service's attempt to invalidate a patent for a machine that scans and processes barcodes with address information.

She also wrote the majority opinion for the Tims v. Indiana case.

Jason, can you get us up to speed on that?

Sure. And on the subject of returns, it's great to be back myself. So this week, the court unanimously held that the excessive fines clause of the Eighth Amendment applies to the states. It's potentially

a major win for property owners and individual citizens facing excessive fines,

fees, and forfeitures. This case involved a man named Tyson Thames, who sold $225 worth of heroin

to undercover police officers. He was arrested and pleaded guilty and given a sentence of two

years of home confinement, five years of probation, and was ordered to pay about $1,200 in fees and

court costs. But the state of Indiana also employed a private law firm to forfeit his $42,000

land rover as an instrumentality of his drug crime under the state's civil forfeiture laws.

Timms challenged that seizure as excessive and won into Indiana courts, but the state Supreme Court held that the excessive fines clause, unlike the Eighth Amendments to other protections against cruel and unusual punishment and excessive bail, had never been held to apply against the states, a process referred to as incorporation.

So Tim's took his challenge to the Supreme Court, and this week he

prevailed. All nine justices agreed that the clause applies against the states. Justice Ruth Bader

Ginsburg, writing for eight of the justices, found, quote, the historical and logical case for

incorporation to be, quote, overwhelming, and that the right against excessive fines easily meets

the test for incorporation, namely that it is both deeply rooted in our history and fundamental to

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