These issues aren’t exactly sexy or hot-button, but they both have important ramifications.

The former topic involves lower-court judges who use the cases before them as an excuse to change federal policies nationwide. This has especially been a problem for the Trump administration’s executive rulemaking: Someone will challenge a new rule before a liberal judge, and the judge will halt the rule across the entire country before it even goes into effect, tying up the process indefinitely. This practice is relatively new and goes beyond the rightful role of a district judge, which is to resolve controversies among the parties that show up in court. The Supreme Court took up Trump v. Pennsylvania earlier this year, and if you want to dive into the legal weeds, I recommend this new brief from Nicholas Bagley and Samuel Bray.


By contrast, the Supreme Court has decided not to get involved in mandatory bar-association fees for the time being — it denied cert in Fleck v. Wetch Monday — but there is another case on the same issue, Jarchow v. State Bar of Wisconsin, it may handle soon. The gist of the matter: In 2018’s Janus v. AFSCME, the Court ruled that public-sector employers could not require their workers to pay dues or fees to a union. The new question is whether, in the same vein, states may require all practicing lawyers to be members of a bar association. Both unions and bar associations are political organizations that openly take (and fund) stances on political issues, and in both cases the government is requiring workers to pay these organizations or give up their jobs, so the parallels are pretty clear. (In a certain sense, the bar-association requirement is worse: You need to be a member of the bar not only to be a lawyer for the government, but even to practice law privately.) Hopefully the Court will like Jarchow more than it liked Fleck.