Welcome to this edition of Supreme Court Brief. With Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s death affecting the court’s scheduled conference Friday, the justices took the bench at 10 a.m. without issuing their usual list of orders in pending cases.
Before kicking off the final argument week of the year with the government’s challenge to Purdue Pharma’s $6 billion bankruptcy plan, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. paid tribute to O’Connor in a lengthy statement that he read from the bench. He recounted her unusual life journey from, as she called herself, “a cowgirl from the Arizona desert” to a pioneering female jurist.
