Welcome to Supreme Court Brief. I'm Jimmy Hoover. I cover the court for the National Law Journal and Law.comIn this newsletter, I provide the sophisticated SCOTUS watcher with the latest news and analysis from my vantage inside the nation's most powerful courtroom.

The justices heard their final arguments of the October sitting Wednesday. I wrote about one of those, San Francisco v. EPA, for the NLJ here

Wading through the sewage fight between the Environmental Protection Agency and the city and county of San Francisco, the court members were predictably split about whether the federal agency has the authority to impose broad and generic conditions about water quality standards on the municipality. Among the court's Republican appointees, however, it was Justice Samuel Alito Jr. (arguably the most conservative justice) who appeared most sympathetic toward the EPA.