Each week on The Term, Supreme Court reporter Jimmy Hoover and co-host Natalie Rodriguez break down all the high court action.
Up top, Jimmy dives into the court's unusual alignment in Thursday's 6-3 decision in Niz-Chavez v. Garland, in which Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion faced off against Justice Brett Kavanaugh's dissent over who had the better reading of federal immigration law. The clash between the two Trump appointees hinged on the meaning of the word "a."
The hosts then turn to two new cases taken up by the court for next term on Monday. In one, the court is considering the biggest expansion of gun rights since its 2008 Second Amendment ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. In the other, the justices will consider the federal government's appeal to shield evidence of CIA "black sites" from a Guantanamo Bay prisoner claiming to have been tortured at U.S.-government run facilities across numerous countries.
For the main segment this week, Jimmy and Natalie discuss the court's oral arguments on Wednesday in the case Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. The case involves a profanity-laced Snapchat posted by a junior varsity cheerleader who didn't make her school's varsity team. The justices struggled to come up with a test that would allow schools to punish disruptive online speech, while avoiding all-out censorship on social media sites where students express themselves.
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