Welcome to Supreme Court Brief. My name is Jimmy Hoover. I have been covering the Supreme Court for the National Law Journal since April 2023. In these pages, I provide the sophisticated SCOTUS watcher with the latest news and analysis out of the nation's most powerful tribunal, with each edition bringing you argument recaps, opinion analysis, attorney spotlights and more. 

Election Day was just another Tuesday at the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in two cases. I covered the second of those, EMD Sales Inc. v. Sanchez Carrera, for the NLJ here. The case asks whether employers must satisfy a heightened evidentiary burden to prove that workers are exempt from the protections of a 1938 federal labor law. Williams & Connolly's Lisa Blatt, arguing on behalf of a D.C.-area food distributor, said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit erred in concluding that employers must show by "clear and convincing evidence" that an exemption under the Fair Labor Standards Act applies. The justices seemed largely sympathetic to those arguments.

As is sometimes the case for the second hearing of the day, there was a noticeable drop in the intensity of questioning from the bench compared to the morning's lively–and lengthy–Medicare reimbursement arguments. Perhaps the justices were simply looking forward to lunch. Or maybe some of them were eager to get over to the polls to "exercise the elective franchise" (as Chief Justice Melville Fuller once described voting). Either way, one wonders whether advocates mind playing second fiddle to the opening act of the day.