The state Senate has confirmed Gov. John Carney’s two nominees for the Delaware Supreme Court, including a lawyer tapped by Carney for the high court after he was arrested for drunken driving.

Carney’s nominations of Abigail LeGrow and N. Christopher Griffiths were confirmed Wednesday with no support from Senate Republicans. Despite Griffiths’ DUI arrest in January, GOP lawmakers were primarily outraged that, for the first time in decades, there will be no resident of Kent County on the state’s highest court.

“The governor of this great state threw us under the bus,” said Sen. Eric Buckson, a Kent County Republican.

Senate Minority Whip Brian Pettyjohn of Georgetown described Carney’s decision to forego nominating a justice from central Delaware as “insulting.”

Last week, members of the Democrat-controlled House unanimously passed a bipartisan bill mandating that the five-member Supreme Court include at least one justice from central Kent County, one from southern Sussex County, and two from northern New Castle County. The state Senate declined to take up the bill before voting on Carney’s nominees. Two Dover-area Democratic senators who cosponsored the bill, Trey Paradee and Kyra Hoffner, voted Wednesday to confirm Carney’s picks.

“Judge LeGrow and Chris have the experience, knowledge, and commitment to public service necessary to serve on the Supreme Court,” Carney said in a statement issued after they were confirmed.

Before the Senate vote, Pettyjohn questioned Griffiths during a Senate Executive Committee hearing about the traffic stop that led to his arrest, but Griffiths offered few details.

“The bottom line is this, I had too much to drink, and I should not have drove,” said Griffiths, who said he complied with the trooper who stopped him.

Griffiths, who will be the first black man to serve on the Supreme Court, also indicated that he feared that the trooper, whom he nevertheless described as “a complete gentleman,” might physically abuse him because of his race.

“I’m a black man driving around in lower Delaware at a mostly white beach, and I want to go home to my family,” Griffiths said. “There’s a lot of things in the national news that are burned in our minds and our hearts, and I wanted that officer to know “we’re on the same team.’”

“I have images in my brain from the biases I bring to that situation of, man, I want to make sure I go home tonight. I want to make sure there’s not a knee in my back but that I go home alive,” Griffiths added.

Griffiths pleaded guilty in March to reckless driving that was alcohol-related, an offense he compared to “a simple traffic ticket.” He was fined and ordered to complete an education course for those charged with driving under the influence.

LeGrow and Griffiths replace Tamika R. Montgomery-Reeves, who now sits on a federal appeals court, and Justice James T. Vaughn Jr., a Kent County resident who retired effective this week.

LeGrow has served as Superior Court judge since February 2016. She previously served as a Master in Chancery on the Delaware Court of Chancery. LeGrow received her law degree from the Pennsylvania State University. Griffiths has been a partner at the Wilmington law firm of Connolly Gallagher, which also employs Democratic state Sen. Kyle Evans Gay. He previously was a wealth manager for Wilmington Trust Company and the Vanguard Group. Griffiths, who received his law degree from Villanova University, is the son of Norman Griffiths, a retired DuPont attorney who served 20 years on the Wilmington City Council.

The U.S. Supreme Court will take up the subject of who pays for workers who gather valuable data aboard commercial fishing boats.

Justices announced Monday that they will take the case, which stems from a lawsuit by a group of fishermen who want to stop the federal government from making them pay for the workers. The workers are tasked with collecting data on board fishing vessels to help inform rules and regulations.

The fishermen involved in the lawsuit harvest Atlantic herring, which is a major fishery off the East Coast that supplies both food and bait. Lead plaintiff Loper Bright Enterprises of New Jersey and other fishing groups have said federal rules unfairly require them to pay hundreds of dollars per day to contractors.

“Our way of life is in the hands of these justices, and we hope they will keep our families and our community in mind as they weigh their decision,” said Bill Bright, a New Jersey fisherman and plaintiff in the case.

The high court announced its decision to take the case via an order list that made no comment on the merits of the lawsuit. The fishermen previously lost in lower court rulings. Their lawsuit over fishing monitors is part of a long-standing fight between commercial fishing groups and the federal government over who pays for data collection and regulatory compliance.

Fishermen have argued that Congress never gave federal regulators authority to require the expense of paying for monitors.

Fisheries in the U.S. are regulated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A representative for NOAA declined to comment on the case. The agency does not typically comment on pending litigation.

A German court said Wednesday that a landlord sunbathing naked in the courtyard of his building wasn’t a reason for his tenants to reduce their rental payments.

The case involved a building in an upmarket residential district of Frankfurt, which included an office floor, rented by a human resources company. The company withheld rent because it objected, among other things, to the landlord’s naked sunbathing. In response, the landlord sued.

The Frankfurt state court rejected the company’s reasoning, finding that “the usability of the rented property was not impaired by the plaintiff sunning himself naked in the courtyard.”

It said in a statement that it couldn’t see an “inadmissible, deliberately improper effect on the property.”

Judges were ruling on an appeal against a lower court decision that went in the landlord’s favor, and the tenant had only limited success overall. They found that the tenant had been entitled to reduce rental payments for three months only because of noisy construction work in the neighborhood.

The court said that the spot where the landlord sunbathed could only be seen from the rented office by leaning far out of the window.

It also said the tenant failed to prove that he took the stairs to the courtyard unclothed. “On the contrary, the plaintiff stated credibly that he always wore a bathrobe which he only took off just before the sun lounger,” it said.

A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked House Republicans from questioning a former Manhattan prosecutor about the criminal case against ex-President Donald Trump, the latest twist in a legal battle between Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office and the House Judiciary Committee.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay late Wednesday, hours after a lower court judge ruled there was no legal basis to block the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena to former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz. Committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, had sought to question him Thursday.

In issuing the stay, Judge Beth Robinson noted that her order “reflects no judgment regarding the merits” of the case. A three-judge panel will ultimately weigh whether to uphold or overturn the lower-court’s decision. Robinson, a Biden appointee, set an aggressive briefing schedule, ordering Bragg’s office to file court papers detailing its appeal by Friday and for the Judiciary Committee to submit its response by Saturday.

Bragg’s office appealed to the 2nd Circuit hours after U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil rejected his request for a temporary restraining order, ruling Wednesday that Jordan had a valid legislative purpose in issuing the subpoena.

The Supreme Court is being asked to decide under what circumstances businesses must accommodate the needs of religious employees.

A case before the justices Tuesday involves a Christian mail carrier in rural Pennsylvania. He was told that as part of his job he’d need to start delivering Amazon.com packages on Sundays. He declined, saying his Sundays are for church and family. U.S. Postal Service officials initially tried to get substitutes for the man’s shifts, but they couldn’t always. When he didn’t show, that meant more work for others. Ultimately, the man quit and sued for religious discrimination.

The case is the latest religious confrontation the high court has been asked to referee. In recent years, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority has been particularly sensitive to the concerns of religious plaintiffs. That includes a ruling last year in which the court said a public high school football coach should be allowed to pray on the field after games. Another case the court is weighing this term involves a Christian graphic artist who wants to create wedding websites, but doesn’t want to serve gay couples.

A federal law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, requires employers to accommodate employees’ religious practices unless doing so would be an “undue hardship” for the business. But a Supreme Court case from 1977, Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, says employers can deny religious accommodations to employees when they impose “more than a de minimis cost” on the business.

Three current justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — have said the court should reconsider the Hardison case.

The case currently before the court involves Gerald Groff, a former employee of the U.S. Postal Service in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. For years, Groff was a fill-in mail carrier who worked on days when other mail carriers were off.

But when an Amazon.com contract with the Postal Service required carriers to start delivering packages on Sundays, Groff balked. Initially, to avoid the shifts, Groff transferred to a more rural post office not yet doing Sunday deliveries, but eventually that post office was required to do them too.

The Biden administration and a drug manufacturer asked the Supreme Court on Friday to preserve access to an abortion drug free from restrictions imposed by lower court rulings, while a legal fight continues.

The Justice Department and Danco Laboratories both warned of “regulatory chaos” and harm to women if the high court doesn’t block an appeals court ruling in a case from Texas that had the effect of tightening Food and Drug Administration rules under which the drug, mifepristone, can be prescribed and dispensed.

The new limits would take effect Saturday unless the court acts before then.

“This application concerns unprecedented lower court orders countermanding FDA’s scientific judgment and unleashing regulatory chaos by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, wrote Friday, less than two days after the appellate ruling.

A lawyer for the anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations suing over mifepristone said the justices should reject the drugmaker’s and the administration’s pleas and allow the appeals court-ordered changes to take effect.

The fight over mifepristone lands at the Supreme Court less than a year after conservative justices reversed Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.

The justices are being asked for a temporary order to keep in place Food and Drug Administration regulations governing mifepristone. Such an order would give them time to more fully consider each side’s arguments without the pressure of a deadline.

The Biden administration and Danco, which is based in New York, also want a more lasting order that would keep the current rules in place as long as the legal fight over mifepristone continues. As a fallback, they asked the court to take up the issue, hear arguments and decide by early summer a legal challenge to mifepristone that anti-abortion doctors and medical organizations filed last year.

The court rarely acts so quickly to grant full review of cases before at least one appeals court has thoroughly examined the legal issues involved.

A ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late Wednesday would prevent the pill, used in the most common abortion method, from being mailed or prescribed without an in-person visit to a doctor. It also would withdraw the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone for use beyond the seventh week of pregnancy. The FDA says it’s safe through 10 weeks.