WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court opens its November argument session on Monday, November 2, with two cases that turn on procedure rather than headlines — but whose answers will shape how ordinary lawsuits and prison sentences actually work. In the first, the justices will consider whether an employer that failed to plead a defense at the start of a case may still win on that defense at the end of it. In the second, they will consider whether a federal prisoner may use habeas corpus to challenge how the Bureau of Prisons applies time credits he earned toward an earlier move to a halfway house or home confinement. Neither case will be decided on Monday; arguments are the beginning of a process that usually ends with opinions months later. But the questions the justices ask will signal how far each side’s argument reaches.
The two cases arrive on the same morning for different reasons. One is a civil procedure dispute with high stakes for workers and employers: a pregnancy discrimination claim in which the employer’s winning argument arrived late. The other is a criminal justice dispute with high stakes for thousands of federal prisoners: a claim about earned time credits under the First Step Act, the 2018 law that lets prisoners earn their way toward less restrictive custody by completing programs meant to reduce reoffending. Together they illustrate what the Court’s November session actually does — it settles the rules of the road that lower courts apply every day, in cases far less famous than the constitutional showdowns that dominate coverage.
Younge v. Fulton: a pregnancy discrimination claim and a defense raised late
The first case, Younge v. Fulton Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office, began in April 2019, when Jasmine Younge was hired as Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Policy and Programs by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. in Georgia. She was third-in-command in the office, supervised more than 30 employees and worked closely with Howard. About two months after starting, Younge told Howard she was pregnant. She alleges that he then stopped meeting with her, reassigned some of her duties, and fired her two weeks later.
Younge sued for pregnancy discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that bars employment discrimination. In answering her complaint, the district attorney’s office asserted several affirmative defenses, but it did not assert that Younge was “personal staff” of an elected official and therefore exempt from Title VII’s protections. The office raised that personal-staff exemption later, at summary judgment — the stage at which a court decides whether a case should go to trial at all — and the district court allowed it to do so, then granted summary judgment for the office. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, holding that Younge was not unfairly surprised or prejudiced by the late argument, in part because she never moved to reopen discovery.
The question before the Supreme Court is narrow and technical, and the justices will hear it framed in exactly those terms: whether a defendant may assert an affirmative defense as the basis for a summary judgment motion where the defense was not raised in a pleading, the defendant did not seek to amend the pleading, and amending the pleading could have been barred by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16(b)(4), which governs changes to a court’s scheduling order. In plain language, the Court must decide whether a defense not properly pleaded at the outset is lost, or whether a court may forgive the omission when the other side was not genuinely harmed.
The two sides read the same record differently. Younge argues that the rules require defendants to plead affirmative defenses early so that plaintiffs have fair notice of what they must answer, and that letting a dispositive defense surface at summary judgment deprives plaintiffs of the chance to develop evidence against it. The district attorney’s office counters that its answer did give fair notice: the answer expressly stated that Younge was a member of the district attorney’s personal staff, using the precise statutory term of art that Title VII itself uses for employees who are not covered by the law. On that reading, the defense was not smuggled in late at all — it was present in substance from the start, even if it was not labeled as a defense until later.
The practical stakes extend well beyond one firing. Employment lawyers describe the case as a “use it or lose it” test. A ruling for Younge would impose a strict discipline on defendants: identify every possible defense — statutory exemptions, time limits, failure to exhaust remedies — at the very beginning of a lawsuit, or risk losing the best defense entirely. A ruling for the office would preserve flexibility for courts to overlook pleading mistakes when no real prejudice resulted. Either way, the decision will be read closely by corporate legal teams and human resources departments, which will adjust how they answer discrimination complaints, and by workers’ lawyers, who will adjust how they test whether a defense was properly raised.
Maxwell v. Dinis: prison time credits and the door to the courthouse
The second case, Maxwell v. Dinis, concerns William Maxwell, a federal prisoner serving a 20-year sentence for racketeering offenses arising from a 2007 conspiracy, in which prosecutors said members of a mob-related organized crime group conspired to take over a Texas-based mortgage-loan company and drain its assets. Maxwell completed programming under the First Step Act and earned time credits that, he says, the Bureau of Prisons failed to apply properly — shorting him by about 42 months of credit toward an earlier transfer to prerelease custody.
Understanding the claim requires understanding how First Step Act credits work. Prisoners earn credits by completing recidivism-reduction programs and productive activities. The first 365 credits can reduce a sentence by up to a year. Any leftover credits are applied to extra time in prerelease custody — a halfway house or home confinement — which is still Bureau of Prisons custody, and is distinct from supervised release, the separate part of a sentence that begins only after imprisonment ends and is overseen by a probation officer and a federal court. Maxwell’s argument is that the bureau’s refusal to apply his leftover credits kept him in a low-security prison when the law entitled him to be in the community instead.
Maxwell filed a habeas corpus petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, the statute that lets federal prisoners challenge the legality of their detention. The district court dismissed his petition, reasoning that he had not exhausted his administrative remedies. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed on a different ground: it held that habeas relief under section 2241 is unavailable unless the inmate’s claim would automatically entitle him to accelerated release. Because a transfer to a halfway house or home confinement is not the same as release from custody, the Fifth Circuit said, Maxwell could not use habeas at all, and should instead have brought a civil rights suit.
That ruling produced an unusual alignment. The government told the Supreme Court that the Fifth Circuit’s holding is incorrect and filed a brief supporting vacatur — that is, asking the Court to wipe out the judgment below. When the government agrees with the petitioner, the Court appoints a private attorney to defend the lower court’s reasoning so that both sides are tested at argument. The Court did so here, and it also granted the government’s request for divided argument, letting the Solicitor General use part of Maxwell’s argument time to make the government’s own case for his position. The arrangement is a strong signal about how shaky the lower ruling is thought to be, but it is not a decision: the justices will still test both sides on Monday.
Maxwell’s legal argument draws on two strands of Supreme Court precedent. In its 2023 decision in Jones v. Hendrix, the Court said habeas remains available for a federal prisoner to challenge the legality of his detention without attacking the validity of his sentence — and Maxwell argues that contesting a refusal to move him to prerelease custody fits that description, since he challenges where and how he is held, not whether his conviction stands. In the older case of Preiser v. Rodriguez, from 1973, the Court held that a state prisoner must use habeas, not a civil rights suit, to challenge the denial of good-conduct time credits. Maxwell also points to Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurrence in Wilkinson v. Dotson as support for using habeas to seek a reduction in the level of custody.
The appointed attorney defending the Fifth Circuit’s view has offered a different framework: habeas should be available when the claim implies that physical detention must be shortened or terminated, when the prisoner is entitled to earlier release on bail or parole, or when the sentencing court ordered the prisoner to serve a sentence somewhere it lacked jurisdiction to send him. The government, while agreeing with Maxwell, has suggested a narrower scope than he proposes, arguing that challenges should succeed only when they demonstrate an unlawful prolonging of imprisonment. The justices’ questions on Monday are likely to probe exactly where that line falls — and whether any line the Court draws will be workable for the lower courts that must apply it.
Why the Supreme Court November 2 arguments reach beyond two litigants
Maxwell’s case matters to more than one prisoner because a circuit split has developed over precisely this question: whether an inmate may bring a habeas claim when the credits being denied would give him only more time in a halfway house or home confinement, rather than a shorter sentence. Some courts have allowed such claims; the Fifth Circuit did not. A Supreme Court ruling will resolve that split one way or the other, and the answer will determine whether thousands of federal prisoners with similar complaints have a courthouse door open to them at all.
Maxwell argues that if habeas is closed, he has no other route. The Supreme Court has severely limited civil rights suits against federal officials under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, federal law has no equivalent of the statute that permits such suits against state officials, and the Administrative Procedure Act is largely unavailable for Bureau of Prisons matters because a separate statute makes it inapplicable to most of them. The case has drawn support from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the advocacy group FAMM, habeas scholars, and a bipartisan group of senators that includes Cory Booker, Dick Durbin, Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee — lawmakers who helped write the First Step Act itself. That breadth of support, across the usual partisan lines, reflects the law’s own bipartisan origins.
The Bureau of Prisons, for its part, has faced sustained criticism over how it calculates and applies First Step Act credits, including wait lists for programming and inconsistent case-manager decisions. The agency’s leadership has said it created a dedicated First Step Act department, with staff working across the country with case managers to make sure credits are applied properly and programming is available. Whether those administrative fixes resolve the underlying disputes, or whether prisoners still need a judge to enforce the credits, is part of what the Court’s answer will determine.
Monday’s session also sets up the rest of the week. On Tuesday, November 3, the Court is scheduled to hear St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, the Colorado case in which Catholic preschools argue they were denied state funding under a universal preschool program because of religious discrimination — a case USN has covered separately. Later in the session come cases on habeas procedure, immigration status and the ability to sue federal officers. Decisions in Monday’s cases are expected later in the term, not this week, and the justices may yet surprise observers with questions that reframe both disputes. For now, the significance of November 2 is that the Court has chosen to spend its first day of the session on the machinery of justice itself: who must say what, and when, before a court will listen — and whether a prisoner who earned his way toward the door may ask a judge to open it.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Legal News Feed, Epstein Becker Green and Legal Information Services Associates.