The privacy rights group Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed an emergency petition with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to stop the National Security Agency from collecting Americans’ phone records. The petition seeks to vacate a secret order by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – revealed in a leak by Edward Snowden – that ordered a Verizon business subsidiary to give the government all its customer records on an “ongoing daily basis.” Alternatively, the petition asks the court to grant review of the surveillance court’s ruling. The ABA Journal has more on the story and links to coverage.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Saturday told a group of federal judges that federal budget cuts are having a different and more severe impact on the courts than other government agencies. “The cuts hit us particularly hard because we are made up of people. That is what the judicial branch is. It is not like we are the Pentagon where you can slow up a particular procurement program … When we have sustained cuts that mean[s] people have to be furloughed or worse and that has a more direct impact on the services that we can provide.” Gavel Grab reports on the remarks.

Vanderbilt University Law School professor and constitutional law scholar Suzanna Sherry says the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas in no way portends the end of affirmative action and is likely to have very little impact on most universities. “Those who would portray it as the end of affirmative action are overreacting. The court went out of its way to endorse earlier decisions upholding affirmative action,” said Sherry. “There’s no change in the law,” she continued, noting that the court, consistent with its previous cases, held only that courts must carefully scrutinize any use of race in admissions.

The Supreme Court today struck down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, ruling on a 5-4 vote that legally married same-sex spouses may receive federal benefits, The New York Times reports. The court also vacated a lower court ruling on Prop 8, saying the 9th Circuit should not have taken the appeal. In Tennessee, Stonewall Bar Association President Sam Felker praised the "significant victory." The Stonewall Bar had filed an amicus brief in the Prop 8 case. He says the immediate effect for Tennesseans from today's rulings "will depend on how the different federal agencies decide to handle the marriage question. Some agencies, for example the IRS and Social Security Administration, look to whether your marriage is recognized in the state where you live. But other agencies, such as Immigration, recognize if the marriage is valid, not where you live." The opinion lays the groundwork, Felker says, for cases that will challenge laws like Tennessee's that prohibit same-sex marriage. "That will be the next round," he says. The Tennessean has further reaction from David Fowler, who crafted Tennessee's state statute and constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, ACLU-TN Executive Director Hedy Weinburg, and others.

The U.S. Supreme Court has saved two of its most controversial opinions for what is expected to be the last day of this term. The court is expected to issue rulings on the California gay marriage ban and the federal Defense of Marriage Act tomorrow beginning at 10 a.m. SCOTUSblog will begin live blogging from the court at 9 a.m.

The U.S. Supreme Court today struck down a key provision of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that established a formula used to determine which jurisdictions must get clearance before making changes to their voting practices. In a 5-4 decision, the court said the formula is unconstitutional given the advances in voting rights in the covered states. The justices said Congress needs to revisit the issue, Scotusblog reports, and if it wants to single out certain states for extra scrutiny, it must do so "on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions."

• The court also ruled in an adoption case involving the Indian Child Welfare Act finding that the biological father, who is part Cherokee, did not have an automatic right his child because he was estranged from the biological mother, provided no support during the pregnancy and disclaimed any interest in raising the girl. The court ruled 5-4 that the law was intended to protect Native American children from abusive adoption or foster care practices that removed them from existing families, not every removal proceeding involving an Indian child.

• Finally, the court today rejected a Florida Supreme Court decision to dismiss a case from a landowner seeking to develop a portion of his wetlands property. When officials refused to approve Coy Koontz's project unless he made certain concessions -- including spending money to improve public lands elsewhere -- Koontz sued under a state law permitting him to seek damages. The state Supreme Court held that he did not have a claim based on two previous U.S. Supreme Court cases. The high court rejected the state’s interpretation of those cases but did not rule on whether Koontz’s claim had merit.

One of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most anticipated cases of its current term — a challenge to the University of Texas' affirmative action admissions process — ended with a ruling that skirted the issue of whether the program is discriminatory. Instead, the justices found that the lower court had not held the university to the “demanding burden of strict scrutiny” it set out in an earlier ruling. If the lower court were to decide race was a "determining factor" in the admissions policy, it could mean that the program would not pass the high court’s test. NPR has more.

The Supreme Court also ruled today that generic drug manufacturers cannot be sued in state court for a drug design defect if federal officials approved the brand-name version that the generic drug copied. The justices voted 5-4 to agree with generic manufacturer Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. Inc., which had asked that a $21 million judgment against it be dismissed. The Memphis Daily News has the story.

A sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court today decided two cases that some say will make it harder to sue and get judgments against employers for discrimination and retaliation claims, the Memphis Daily News reports. In the first case, the court defined a supervisor as a person who has the ability to hire and fire, undercutting claims that a company is responsible for the racism or sexism of an employee’s coworker. In the second case, the court said juries must find that an employer would not have taken the alleged discriminatory action but for an intention to retaliate. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a rare move, read her dissent aloud in the courtroom and called on Congress to overturn the decisions.

The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether President Barack Obama’s January 2012 appointments to the National Labor Relations Board violated the Constitution. The administration is challenging a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that the appointments were made while Congress was technically in session and therefore were not allowed. The government argues that because the Senate had ceased business for an extended period of time, the president’s use of the recess appointments clause was appropriate. Read more in the Blog of Legal Times.