Welcome to Supreme Court Brief, your go-to column on the day’s high court news. Today, I will be breaking down the justices’ questions about the proper use of their emergency docket during Wednesday’s hearing in a case about the EPA’s new air quality standards for upwind states.
But first, the court handed down two merits decisions in previously argued cases before launching into the day’s oral arguments. The first of those, McElrath v. Georgia, was a unanimous ruling barring Georgia from retrying a man whose acquittal for malice murder was later thrown out as logically inconsistent with other parts of the verdict. Read my write-up here for the National Law Journal to understand more about this unusual case, which, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recounted in her opinion, began with a family “tragedy.”
