James Romoser was the editor of SCOTUSblog from June 2020 to March 2023. He also wrote "Case Studies," a weekly column on legal affairs for National Journal. He came to SCOTUSblog with experience as both a legal journalist and a litigator.
James began his journalism career in North Carolina as a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal, where he covered everything from tobacco farming to the state legislature. He then attended law school at Georgetown and, upon graduating, practiced First Amendment litigation for two years in Washington, D.C. He returned to journalism in 2018 as an associate editor and legal affairs reporter for Inside Health Policy. In that role, he covered high-profile litigation on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. He also co-founded Circuit Breaker, a website that provided news and information about the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
James has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia, where he was managing editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator. He loves chess, poetry, the Beatles, and the freedom of information. Follow him on Twitter at @jamesromoser.
The White House said last week that it will stop classifying COVID-19 as a national emergency on May 11. Allowing the emergency declarations to expire will unravel an array of federal policies on issues like free at-home tests, temporary Medicaid coverage, and even immigration.
When ChatGPT, a cutting-edge artificial-intelligence chatbot, launched in November, it captured the attention of the legal community. Some lawyers worried that the program — which can generate eerily human-sounding text in response to complex written prompts — would make them obsolete.
At the end of each year, SCOTUSblog remembers some of the people whose lives and work left an imprint on the Supreme Court. From legendary lawyers to lesser-known activists, journalists, and plaintiffs, the following individuals who died in 2022 all shaped the court and the law in their own ways.
When Justice Stephen Breyer retired over the summer, the Supreme Court lost its loudest dissenting voice on an issue that makes up a large yet overlooked chunk of the court’s docket: the death penalty. Early in his career, Breyer accepted the constitutionality of capital punishment.
In a term already packed with intellectual-property fights, the justices now have another one to chew on: a trademark scuffle over a squeaking dog toy.
The Supreme Court late Thursday night overturned a lower court’s ruling and allowed Alabama to proceed with its plan to carry out an execution, but state prison officials were unable to kill the man before his death warrant expired at midnight.
“The bird is freed,” Elon Musk tweeted on the night he completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. What he didn’t say is that a series of court cases may soon clip its wings.
Former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block the disclosure of his federal income tax returns to a congressional committee.
Last term at the Supreme Court teemed with culture-war issues: guns, religion, climate change, COVID vaccines, and of course abortion. This term will be defined largely by just one: race.
You know all about Roe. But have you heard about Ruan? Just three days after the thunderous ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court issued another important decision on a pressing health care issue.
The fate of hundreds of millions of dollars in unclaimed money may depend on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the term “money order” in an arcane 1974 federal statute. On one side is Delaware. On the other side are 30 other states.
When the Supreme Court returns to the bench on Monday for its first oral arguments of the new term, Justice Clarence Thomas almost certainly will ask the first question. Thomas, who was appointed in 1991, is the court’s longest-serving justice and was for many years its most taciturn member.