Even though the first Monday in October landed late on the calendar this year, the official start of the U.S. Supreme Court term still snuck up on us here at Litigation Daily. Thank goodness our colleague Jimmy Hoover, who covers all things SCOTUS for The National Law Journal and Law.com, has us covered. Jimmy went live well before the first cry of "Oyez!" at One First Street with a 3,000-word curtain-raiser on the upcoming term—one that falls at a critical time for the public's faith in the court. Here's how he summed things up:

More than two years have passed since the court's conservative majority dashed the nearly 50-year-old right to abortion to the rocks of constitutional history in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. But unlike after Bush v. Gore, a similarly nation-splitting event two decades earlier, the court's popularity has yet to fully recover.