Watch Snobs

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

[00:27:49] - Justice Sotomayor's statement respecting denial of cert on ineffective assistance

[00:29:53] - Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction: bankruptcy and judicial estoppel

[00:36:10] - The Fifth Circuit's rule on inadvertence and mistake

[00:38:47] - Justice Jackson's majority opinion

[00:40:29] - Justice Thomas's concurrence and the history of judicial estoppel

[00:48:42] - Justice Sotomayor's concurrence and totality-of-the-circumstances approach

[00:52:11] - Abouammo v. United States: Article III venue and criminal prosecution location

[00:55:09] - Yellowstone's "zone of death" and vicinage problems

[00:59:21] - The fake invoice, FBI investigation, and venue dispute

[01:06:33] - Venue, personal jurisdiction, and extraterritorial conduct

[01:10:22] - Statutory venue rules and unresolved constitutional questions

[01:12:30] - Reprosecution after a venue reversal and double jeopardy