Welcome to Supreme Court Brief. I'm Jimmy Hoover. I've been the National Law Journal's high court correspondent since April 2023. In this newsletter, I provide the sophisticated SCOTUS watcher with the latest news and analysis from the nation's most powerful courtroom, including argument recaps, opinion coverage, attorney spotlights and more.

The court returns today for a short oral argument week following the federal holiday. The first order of business will be the court's 9:30 a.m. orders list, in which the justices could announce new "grants" from their Oct. 11 conference. That Friday meeting featured a number of notable petitions which had been relisted from the previous week's "long conference" that at least some of the court members thought deserved a second look.

Among them are a challenge to the independence of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and a dispute over the proper venue for oil refineries to seek exemptions from the renewable fuel standard program. The latter is yet another case asking whether litigants can challenge federal agency actions in the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, or in the heavy administrative docket of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.