Commercial Litigation Update

With essential unanimity, though with an array of concurrences in one of them, the Supreme Court ruled against government parties in three cases, two of them in favor of homeowners, and in property rights and environmental enforcement cases, and a third, upholding the right of appeal by a prison guard charged with causing a detainee's beating.

The Court has now delivered its final two decisions of the term, one of them of great consequence to administrative law. With adjournment comes the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer and the swearing-in of his successor, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, his former clerk, who is expected to be a dependable member of the Court’s liberal jurisprudential wing. All in all, a day of significance.