Welcome to Supreme Court Brief. I'm Jimmy Hoover. I've been covering the Supreme Court for the National Law Journal and ALM since April 2023. In this newsletter, I provide SCOTUS watchers with the latest news and analysis from my vantage point inside the nation's most powerful courtroom.

The justices wrestled with the False Claims Act on Monday, hearing an hour-and-a-half of oral arguments in the case Wisconsin Bell v. U.S. ex rel. Todd Heath. The case involves an AT&T subsidiary's argument that an industry-funded program to provide low-cost internet to schools and libraries is not subject to the False Claims Act. As I explain in my story for the National Law Journal, the court spent most of the hearing debating not whether the telecom company would lose, but how it would lose. 

Despite hearing only one case, the Supreme Court kept busy Monday. The morning's orders list announced the addition of two new cases to the October 2024 docket. The first of those promises to settle the "endless game of ping-pong" of Louisiana's congressional boundaries. The state's newest map was drawn as a remedy for a previous one that was struck down under the Voting Rights Act for only including a single majority-Black district. But in creating a second majority-Black district, the state had engaged in an illegal racial gerrymander, a separate court later found. "[T]he State is stuck in an endless game of ping-pong—and the State is the ball, not a player," Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga wrote in an appeal to the justices.