More Tea-Leaf Reading on the Dobbs Leak

There is a lot of tea-leaf reading going on right now with the Supreme Court and the Dobbs leak. It seems noteworthy that the Court has yet to schedule another day when opinions will be handed down — leaving in limbo, for now, not just Dobbs but the other 37 cases remaining undecided on the Court’s docket. The Court is scheduled to meet in conference on Thursday and to hand down orders next Monday (i.e., mostly to announce cases being taken or denied certiorari for next term), after there being no scheduled conference last Thursday. So the interruption is not a dramatic one yet.

We still don’t know who leaked the draft opinion, and the answer may yet surprise us. But despite frantic efforts by Nina Totenberg and others on the left side of the spectrum to claim otherwise, as I explained last week, the more logical possibility is that the leak came from a left-leaning law clerk. Certainly the people crowing about the leak’s effects have been almost entirely on the left. Here’s Jay Willis, the editor in chief of Demand Justice’s publication “Balls and Strikes”:

Consider one additional puzzle piece: As Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSBlog noted, the Politico report was bylined to include Alex Ward, a national-security reporter who would have no obvious reason to be on the byline of a legal story unless he was the journalist who received the leak. Where did Ward work before Politico? As a White House reporter for the progressive outlet Vox. Ward’s entire résumé is in the national-security area. If the leaker went to a Vox alumnus with no background in legal journalism, how likely is it that the leaker was a conservative?