About this episode

The episode discusses various legal cases and opinions, including judicial estoppel and venue issues, while also touching on Justice speculation and watch brands.

We open with the usual grab bag—the "foot fault" pun buried in a Justice Thomas opinion, reading Justice Alito's clerk-hiring tea leaves, and a detour into the metaphysics of conditional resignations and whether you can be confirmed to a vacancy that doesn't exist yet. Then to the merits: Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction , a 9-0 judicial-estoppel case that lets us ask where the doctrine even came from (Tennessee, 1857, apparently), and Abouammo v. United States , the venue case about a former Twitter employee who fabricated a document while the FBI sat downstairs. The venue talk wanders, happily, into the Yellowstone "zone of death," a C.J. Box thriller, Jim Comey's second career as a novelist, and an extended appraisal of watch brands. Highlights [00:00:53] - Podcast update, SCOTUSblog partnership, and listener reviews [00:01:49] - Justice Thomas's "foot fault" joke [00:03:48] - Sam Bray citation discussion (Aldridge v. Regions Bank) [00:05:02] - Justice Alito retirement speculation and clerk rumors [00:17:23] - Vacation schedule and the upcoming opinion gap [00:21:03] - June 11 merits decisions overview [00:23:17] - Landor and the still-outstanding big case of the term…

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