The Supreme Court announced it will issue its first opinion of the 2022-23 term Monday, the first since the high court ended its term last year by overturning federal abortion access precedent and endured an unprecedented leak of that opinion.
The justices will release one or more opinions Monday in cases argued from the last term, which include major disputes over affirmative action, election law, and religious liberty.
Notice of incoming opinions came just days after prominent court watchers reported on the record-setting time frame the court has gone without releasing a single opinion.
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“It’s really bizarre that they haven’t released one at all,” Adam Feldman, founder of the widely cited Supreme Court blog Empirical SCOTUS, told Bloomberg last week, noting, “This is the longest it’s ever been by quite a large margin.”
Before the high court gave notice that opinions would be coming on Monday, it released a report Thursday announcing it could not unmask the leaker of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization draft opinion, which was published by Politico on May 2.
The report on the investigation into the leak noted there were a total of 82 court personnel who had either electronic or hard copies of the draft.
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Feldman noted last week that there were several possibilities as to why the justices had spent a historical length of time to release new opinions, suggesting the incident may have prompted them to spend more time working on their draft opinions before sharing them with the rest of the court’s personnel.
“The leak I think makes justices more apprehensive about releasing and sharing opinions with each other,” Feldman said. “And if the process of sharing information between the chambers is really slowed down because of the apprehension of possible leaks, then it creates a clog in the system.”
