Here's the PDF of today's oral argument. I'm going to read it right now and give my immediate impressions.
1. Justice Alito topped Justice Kagan at page 11, lines 7-13. Kagan had just sprung her elaborate clerks-writing-memos hypothetical, and Alito said "Well... if I had those clerks, I had the same clerks and Amanda wrote the memo, and I received it and I said, This is a great memo, who wrote it? Would the answer be it was written by Will, because Amanda stepped into Will's shoes?" Kagan had to respond to the laughter in the courtroom: "He's good."
2. Justice Sotomayor stumbles at page 16, line 2, after raising a principle of statutory interpretation from last year's Bond case (the chemicals-on-the-doorknob case, where the Court read a federal statute not to criminalize a matter that lay within the traditional powers of the state). She'd just spoken for a page and a half, and the petitioners' lawyer Michael A. Carvin was beginning to explain that this principle had never been applied in the context of a condition on federal spending. Sotomayor interrupted to "Oh, we did it -- we said it last year." But she just meant to repeat her point about Bond, which wasn't about conditional spending.
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