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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

DRUNK HISTORY - In less than a week, the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative justices have replaced the usual tests for weighing constitutional violations in the arenas of guns, abortion and religion with a history-tradition test that cements their professed belief in originalism, and creates new challenges for judges and litigants, Law.com's Marcia Coyle reports. "The run-of-the-mill judge anywhere in the United States is not going to have the knowledge to say this [restriction or regulation] is wrong or right unless there's the odd judge who has read a lot of history," one scholar of American history said. "Their political views will undoubtedly tell them how to evaluate this, what to use. It's very cynical, but true." The other problem with using a history-and-tradition approach, according to a number of historians, is that history often provides no definitive answer and historians often disagree. What's worse, most judges and clerks who try to look to history for answers are dependent on the court's library and online resources. "They don't know the scholarship; they don't know the sources," Second Amendment historian Saul Cornell of Fordham University told Coyle. "Every historian knows that when you start your research, you have a working hypothesis. It's drummed into you that when evidence comes in, you have to reexamine the hypothesis. The court's approach is like a Mad Lib game we did as kids. It would be funny except it's our lives."

STATES OF FLUX - Some companies are trying to create workarounds for employees in states with restrictive abortion laws by providing benefits that would allow them to travel out-of-state to access abortion services, joining a chorus of companies that announced they would do so in response to a Texas law last year and the leak of a draft version of the opinion in May. But employment attorneys told Law.com's Jessica Mach those efforts will occur amid a rapidly shifting legal landscape. Companies that have employees in several states and are looking to provide them with abortion-related benefits "would really need to do a state-by-state analysis of what the abortion laws are, whether and under what circumstances abortion is legal in most states," said Sarah Raaii, an associate at McDermott Will & Emery who specializes in employee benefits. "That may be a moving target in the next several days and several weeks." A significant challenge for legal departments is that the growing patchwork of state restrictions can't simply be boiled down to states that ban abortion and states that don't, Raaii said. "Even the restrictions that we've seen in, for instance, Texas and Oklahoma and some of the other states, it seems like each state has created its own timeline of when or under what circumstances abortion might be legal," she said.

WHO GOT THE WORK?℠ - A wholly-owned subsidiary of Targa Resources Corp. has agreed to acquire Lucid Energy Group, a privately-held natural gas processor in the Permian Basin, from Riverstone Holdings LLC and Goldman Sachs Asset Management for $3.55 billion in cash. The transaction, announced June 16, is expected to close in the third quarter of 2022. Houston-based Targa is advised by Vinson & Elkins. Riverstone and Goldman Sachs are represented by Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. Lucid Energy, which is based in Dallas, is advised by a Latham & Watkins team led by partners Charles Carpenter and James Garrett. >> Read the filing on Law.com Radar and check out the most recent edition of Law.com's Who Got the Work?℠ column to find out which law firms and lawyers are being brought in to handle key cases and close major deals for their clients.