Don't, err, "judge" me. Since retiring in January 2021, I have been an active participant in Fantasy SCOTUS, an online forum for crowd-sourcing predictions of cases argued in the Supreme Court's current term/session. My handle there is "geneh".
As they say, it is the journey, not the destination with this activity. Over the past year or so I have learned A LOT about how the Court operates through listening to the live arguments, reading the "writs of certiorari" (usually only the abstracts/syllabi---these things are LONG and Detailed!), responses to the writs, Google searches for objective analysis of the cases, and any opinion pieces I can find.
Listening to the oral arguments is challenging. The complexity/depth of the arguments from both sides of the case can be very hard to follow. It is easy to mentally drift when the banter jumps to prior cases/precedents and terms are used that are definitely "inside baseball" between the judges and the advocates.
The best tool for me to understand the oral arguments is a combination of listening to the audio recording AND reading the transcript of the proceeding that is made available shortly after the live presentation. Those two things would be very time-consuming to do separately, however, there is a YouTube channel that combines the two!
For me, it is helpful to hear and read the arguments at the same time. I can pause the video to Google terms/concepts used in the proceedings that I don't understand. Often that takes me down rabbit holes but the point for me is to keep my brain engaged and to model being a life-long learner.
Here is a video of a case argued this week regarding Social Media and how government officials use their pages for private and/or public purposes. I highly recommend this YouTube channel for learning purposes.
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