Judicial Notice (11.06.21): They're The Captains Now

Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett take control, another legal-tech unicorn emerges, and other legal news from the week that was.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett: they’re the captains now (via Getty Images).

Last week, I was a dynamo. This week, I was a sloth. But I have a good excuse.

On Tuesday, I returned to NYU Langone, where I was hospitalized last year with Covid-19, to get a Covid booster shot (in my case, a third dose of Pfizer). I didn’t get chills or aches, as I did with the first dose, but I did get extremely fatigued. I spent much of the rest of the week sleeping—and finishing season two of Succession, so Zach and I can start watching season three together.¹

Now, on to the news.

Lawyer of the Week: Judd Stone.

For most Supreme Court advocates, their first oral argument before SCOTUS doesn’t involve the most consequential of cases. For example, new lawyers in the Office of the Solicitor General usually get slam-dunk matters that even a newbie can’t screw up.

In the years that I’ve been following SCOTUS, who has had the biggest high-court debut? I’d probably say then-SG Elena Kagan, whose first oral argument before the Court was in a little case called Citizens United in 2009.

But Texas’s solicitor general, Judd E. Stone II, is not far behind. On Monday, he presented his first arguments to the Supreme Court in two matters you might have heard of: Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas, aka the challenges to S.B. 8, Texas’s controversial new abortion law.