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Chief Justice Roberts (Likely) Ordered The Release Of Cook 30 Minutes Before He Announced It

Slaughter and Cook were bundled together, as the Chief (likely) instructed.

Josh Blackman | 6.29.2026 5:18 PM

I have a regular routine for Supreme Court decision days. On one monitor, I have the SCOTUSBlog liveblog. On a second monitor, I have the SupremeCourt.gov opinions page open. I keep Adobe Acrobat ready on a third screen. And the fourth screen is the FantasySCOTUS database, where I immediately score the cases.

Usually SCOTUSBlog announces the case name and the authoring justice a few moments before the PDF link pops up on the website. (Circa 2010, the PDF links were simply the [docketnumber.pdf], so I was able to access some PDFs early by anticipating what cases came down; that practice was changed after I wrote about it.) When a Justice announces a dissent from the bench, we have to wait some time until the next opinion is released.

Today, the release sequence was predictable, until it wasn't.

At 10:01, SCOTUSBlog announced the majority opinion in Watson. Justice Barrett tends to offer long-ish summaries. At 10:09 SCOTUSBlog announced Justice Kagan's opinion in Chartie. At 10:15, Amy Howe announced: "We have Slaughter........

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