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Yesterday’s decision in M&K Employee Solutions v. Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund was pretty much exactly what you would have expected given the argument: a brisk rejection of the idea that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 obligates actuaries to use out-of-date assumptions when they work on pension plans.The case involves a multiemployer pension plan, a common arrangement in which a group of employers in a particular industry band together, collectively agreeing to provide specifically defined benefits to all covered employees. A natural question under those arrangements is what happens when one employer decides to leave the group.

Last month, The New York Times published a major scoop: the inside story of the Supreme Court’s 2016 order blocking then-President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, an environmental initiative intended to address climate change, on its interim docket.In the story, Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak suggested that the order “marks the birth … of the court’s modern ‘shadow docket,’ the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions.” But Kantor and Liptak’s story was notable for another reason: it relied on a series of confidential internal memos that the Times had obtained from an undisclosed source.

A programming note: We are observing Memorial Day on Monday, so you will next receive the SCOTUStoday newsletter on Tuesday.At the CourtOn Thursday, the Supreme Court released its decisions in Havana Docks Corporation v. Royal Caribbean Cruises and M&K Employee Solutions v. Trustees of the IAM National Pension Fund. It also dismissed Hamm v. Smith as improvidently granted.In Havana, the court, by a vote of 8-1, ruled in favor of a U.S. business that, in a lawsuit against several cruise lines, is seeking to recover for its losses under a 1996 law that targets the Cuban regime. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, and Justice Elena Kagan penned a rare solo dissent.

More than 65 years after the confiscation by Cuba’s communist government of assets owned by U.S. businesses there, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favor of a U.S. business that is seeking to recover for its losses under a 1996 law that targets the Cuban regime. By a vote of 8-1, the justices ruled in Havana Docks Corporation v. Royal Caribbean Cruises that Havana Docks, a U.S. company that before 1960 had owned a right to use and operate the docks in the port of Havana, is potentially entitled to receive hundreds of millions of dollars for the use of the port by cruise lines between 2016 and 2019, even if the company’s control of the docks would have expired in 2004.The case hinged on the

The Supreme Court on Thursday left in place a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of an Alabama man who has been on that state’s death row for more than two decades. In a one-sentence, unsigned order, the court dismissed Alabama’s petition for review in Hamm v. Smith as “improvidently granted” – that is, without deciding it. That order leaves undisturbed a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit holding that Joseph Smith is intellectually disabled and therefore cannot be executed.The vote was effectively 5-4. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a 24-page dissent that Justice Clarence Thomas (who also wrote his own 16-page dissent) joined in full and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined in part.