The case involved an emergency challenge to the final stages of development of the 303-mile pipeline, which is to span from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia.
The works have earned Sotomayor $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009. Her taxpayer-funded staffers have been deeply involved in organizing speaking engagements intended to sell the books.
Feelings seem raw at the court, certainly for the court's three liberal justices, who were on the losing end of some of the court's biggest cases this term, but also for the conservatives.
Chief Justice Roberts kept a firm grip on the court. He assigned himself four of the seven most important opinions, including affirmative action, and he won some more nuanced outcomes.
At issue is a 1994 amendment to the Federal Firearms Act that prohibits those who are actively subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms.
The problem for the justices is that all the recent ethics stories — and more — are a corrosive drip, drip, drip, eroding public confidence in the court.
The case pitted prospective adoptive parents and Texas against the act, a federal law aimed at preventing Native American children from being separated from their extended families and their tribes.
Jack Daniel's, the famous Tennessee whiskey company, tried to stop production and marketing of a dog toy shaped and decorated like a Jack Daniel's bottle but with the name "Bad Spaniels" on the label.
Justice Clarence Thomas' disclosure form had been eagerly awaited in the wake of news reports that he accepted luxury trips worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow.
The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to issue opinions in 27 cases that it heard this term, and has about four weeks left to release them. Here are the major cases NPR is watching.
The cases involve allegations that major retail pharmacies knowingly overcharged Medicaid and Medicare by overstating what their "usual and customary prices" are.
The high court ruled against truck drivers who walked off the job, leaving their trucks loaded with wet concrete, but it preserved the rights of workers to time their strikes for maximum effect.
Retired federal Judge Michael Luttig says he wouldn't even accept baseball tickets in his years on the bench: "I believe that federal judges should essentially live like priests or saints or monks."
