My prediction for the trans athletics Supreme Court case is a 6-1-2 ruling, with Kagan writing a concurrence. Kagan is by far the smartest of the three liberal justices. She's smart enough to know that Hartnett's "as-applied" argument means the death of intermediate scrutiny. She's smart enough to know that girls' safety, privacy, and opportunity in sports will be seriously compromised by a ruling that does not uphold state sex-based sports laws. She reads the Washington Post, whose editorial board came out forcefully in favor of sex-based sports. And she knows that public opinion, including among Democratic voters, supports sex-based sports. I don't expect her to join the majority--especially if Roberts assigns Alito or Thomas the majority opinion--but I can't see her signing on to a Sotomayor or Jackson dissent. Like Justice Lewis Powell, who in the Bakke case (1978) tried to split the difference on the constitutionality of racial quotas in admissions by saying that universities can take "diversity" into account, Kagan may try to chart a middle ground between the majority and the dissents. What that'll look like is anyone's guess. Gorsuch will side with the majority. His Bostock decision was, in my view, a rookie's mistake. He was relatively new to the Court and likely anxious about the only intellectual tribunal that matters to SC justices: elite law school professors. He also probably thought--naively--that he could cabin the Bostock ruling to employment; he went out of his way to say that the ruling doesn't apply to other areas like sports and bathrooms. But he has since discovered that social policy cannot be fragmented through judicial reasoning. I think it was sobering for him to discover that just weeks later, the 4th circuit did (in the GG v. Gloucester case) just what he said courts shouldn't do, and the Biden administration, emboldened by the Gloucester ruling, cited it and Bostock in its gender identity policies. End of rank punditry.