At 10 a.m. Monday, the marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court called out the traditional cry of "Oyez," and the nine justices — who spent the summer recess giving speeches, teaching courses and resolving "shadow docket" disputes — took their seats on the nation's top bench for the start of the October 2023 term.

The court heard nearly two hours of oral arguments in the case Pulsifer v. United States, featuring a lively debate about the meaning of the word "and" in the so-called safety-valve provision of the First Step Act. If that sounds dull, the stakes of the case render it anything but, with potentially thousands of prison sentences depending on the meaning of those three letters. I wrote about the hearing, and the lively disagreement among the court's "textualists." 

A half hour before taking the bench, the justices released the remaining orders from their "long conference" from last Tuesday during which they considered the stacks of petitions that had been accumulating since they left for summer recess in late June. The court had already announced their decision to grant review in 12 of those cases Friday, so Monday's list unsurprisingly contained pages and pages of denials of certiorari, or review.