It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

Back with us now on another Supreme Court decision day is Aziz Huck, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago,

and author of the forthcoming book, The Rule of Law, a very short introduction.

Professor Huck has been good enough to be on standby for us for each of the decision days this

month, and here we are again. Professor Huck, ongoing thanks, and welcome back to WNYC.

Good morning, Brian. Thank you for having me. Well, we have a few decisions from today and

yesterday, so let's start to go through them. As people probably heard, the court accidentally

posted a decision yesterday that they weren't actually ready to release on an abortion case

from Idaho.

They then removed it, but this morning they officially announced it.

Can you go over this case for us?

People, I think a lot of people didn't realize abortion was up again in some way before the Supreme Court.

This is a case about a conflict between an Idaho ban on abortions, except for cases in which the life of the mother is at risk, and a federal law called EMTALA that requires hospitals to provide

stabilizing emergency care. And the issue in the case was whether the federal law reempted, which is the

technical term for pushed aside, the Idaho statute in those cases in which the provision of

an abortion was necessary not to protect the life of the mother. That's covered,

or that that's an exception under the Idaho law, but when it's necessary to protect the health of the mother.

The posture of this case, or the way that it came to the court is important for understanding what happened today.

The lower federal court here, the district court, issued an injunction against the Idaho statute,

finding that it was preempted by EMTALA.

The ordinary course of litigation is that that trial court order gets appealed to a federal appeals court, and then the federal appeals court ruling is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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