Showing 1–50 of 52 items published in August 2017, most recent first.
Two of Supreme Court’s cases slated for the fall generate commentary. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse discusses Jennings v. Rodriguez, in which the court will consider whether immigrants who are detained have a right to appear in front of an immigration judge and seek their release after making payments to guarantee that they will appear at later proceedings in the same case.
Briefly: In two posts at The Narrowest Grounds, Asher Steinberg analyzes the Supreme Court’s decision last term in Midland Funding, LLC v. Johnson, in which the justices held that filing a time-barred claim in bankruptcy does not violate the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Petitions before the justices for their October Term 2017 docket continue to generate coverage.
The recently concluded term continues to generate empirical analysis. At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman looks at citations by lower courts to cases from the past term and notes that many of the most-cited cases involve criminal law and procedure.
In a one-sentence order issued this afternoon, Justice Samuel Alito blocked an order by a federal district court in Texas that had invalidated two congressional districts in that state.
Briefly: In a paper posted at SSRN, Jonathan Harkavy reviews the employment law decisions for the October Term 2016.
The Supreme Court is currently in its summer recess, and the justices are not scheduled to meet to review new cases until September 25, when their “long conference” – at which they will consider the approximately 2,000 petitions that have accumulated since the end of June – will take place.
In June, the Supreme Court agreed to review a ruling by a three-judge federal district court striking down the redistricting plan that Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature adopted after the 2010 census.
With the Supreme Court currently without a full slate of merits cases for the fall sittings, some coverage of the Supreme Court focuses on petitions the justices will soon consider.
With the start of the Supreme Court’s October sitting only a little over a month away, some coverage of the court focuses on cases scheduled for oral argument during that sitting.
Briefly: At the George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Frank LoMonte looks at Matal v. Tam, in which the Supreme Court held that the disparagement clause of the Lanham Act violates the First Amendment’s free speech clause; he argues that this case is “welcome news for anyone who depends
Briefly: At her eponymous blog, Amy Howe introduces a series of posts looking at petitions distributed for the justices’ next conference in September.
In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that the decision of Justice Neil Gorsuch “to address a conservative group at the Trump International Hotel in Washington next month, less than two weeks before the court is set to hear arguments on Mr. Trump’s travel ban,” has triggered criticism.
In The Washington Times, Alex Swoyer reports that in an amicus brief filed this week in Carpenter v. United States, “[s]ome of the world’s biggest tech companies pleaded with the Supreme Court … to update decades-old precedent governing telephones, saying that cell-tracking technology threatens
Steven D. Schwinn is a professor of law at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Students of the Constitution can be excused for scratching their heads at the anti-commandeering doctrine.
Elbert Lin is the solicitor general of West Virginia. Thomas M. Johnson Jr. is the deputy solicitor general of West Virginia. The attorney general of West Virginia, Patrick Morrisey, led a certiorari-stage amicus brief in support of the petitioners.
Jonathan Wood is an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, an adjunct fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and a blogger for libertarianenvironmentalism.com.
Zachary S. Price is an associate professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association presents the question whether the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act impermissibly commandeers state legislatures by preventing them from “authoriz[ing]” certain sports gambling.
At BuzzFeed News, Chris Geidner reports that “[o]ne of the country’s top lawyers” has filed a cert petition on behalf of an Arizona death-row inmate who “has been arguing for the past three years that the state’s death penalty law is unconstitutional because it doesn’t do enough to narrow who is
Stacy Papadopoulos is general counsel and senior vice president of industry services at the American Gaming Association, which filed a cert-stage amicus brief in support of the challengers in Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Michael K. Fagan, an adjunct professor at Washington University Law, coordinates the Predatory Gambling Liability Project, a strategic litigation effort of the 501(c)(3) group, Stop Predatory Gambling.
Briefly: Constitution Daily looks at three Supreme Court cases involving the Ku Klux Klan that posed “fundamental First Amendment questions about the ability of organized white supremacists to speak and demonstrate in the public forum.” At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro
Briefly: In The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports on Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, noting that “the Supreme Court took its own sweet time” deciding whether to review the “dispute between a gay couple and a baker who refused to make them a wedding cake,” and that
On the latest edition of our summer series, “In Recess,” Dan Epps and official guest host Leah Litman (filling in for Ian Samuel, who is enjoying a Croatian vacation) get you up to speed on what has been happening at the Supreme Court.
Most Americans are familiar with some parts of the Bill of Rights, such as the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms.
Edward B. Foley is the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law and the director of Election Law @ Moritz at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Will Gill v. Whitford get its “Wechsler brief“?
At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that in its first merits filing in the Supreme Court on the entry-ban cases, “[t]he Trump Administration, insisting that the presidential order limiting entry to the U.S. of foreign nationals from Mideast nations ‘is not a so-called “Muslim ban,”‘ urged
Eric McGhee is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. PPIC has not reviewed or endorsed this blog post, and takes no position on its use for any purpose. The views expressed are McGhee’s personal views, and not those of PPIC.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of dismissing PEM Entities v. Levin, a bankruptcy case that had been scheduled to be heard this coming term. Occasionally, the court dismisses previously granted cases as “improvidently granted” before reaching the merits.
Daniel P. Tokaji is the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. A constitutional standard for partisan gerrymandering is the holy grail of election law.
Tyler Green is the solicitor general of Utah. Utah is one of 16 states that joined a merits-stage amicus curiae brief by the state of Texas in support of the appellants defending Wisconsin’s electoral map.
Briefly: At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston reports on the latest appeals-court filing in the entry-ban case, noting that “[t]he Trump Administration’s legal team indicated on Wednesday that it will take the heated controversy over immigration back to the Supreme Court if government power to
Justin Levitt is a professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; he runs the website “All About Redistricting.” When the Supreme Court last addressed partisan gerrymandering in detail, all nine justices agreed that “an excessive injection of politics” into the redistricting process violates the Constitution.
Rick Esenberg is the founder, president and general counsel of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which filed an amicus brief in support of the state appellants in Gill v. Whitford.
In The Washington Post, Sari Horwitz reports that “[i]n a court filing Monday, Justice [Department] attorneys took the opposite position from the Obama administration in a case that involved the state’s removal of thousands of inactive voters from the Ohio voting rolls” and that the department is
Chris Winkelman is general counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which filed an amicus brief in support of the state appellants in Gill v. Whitford. Phillip Gordon is an associate at Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky PLLC and contributed to the NRCC’s brief.
Thomas P. Wolf is counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
Briefly: At Fa on First, Wen Fa urges the Supreme Court to review a challenge to a Minnesota law that “prohibits voters from wearing political apparel at the polling place,” arguing that “[b]y criminalizing all sorts of shirts, buttons, and badges, Minnesota has essentially created speech-free
Briefly: Counting to 5 (podcast) features an interview with Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, a nonprofit that advocates for institutional reform of the Supreme Court, on the group’s “recent proposal to impose term limits” on Supreme Court justices.
This week’s episode was originally a “bonus” episode exclusively for our premium supporters, but we decided to unlock it for all our listeners in honor of our new partnership with SCOTUSblog.
(UPDATED 5:45 pm: The post has been updated to include additional discussion about the significance of the justices’ decision to block the lower court’s order requiring the state to draw new maps by the fall.)
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will institute electronic filing beginning on November 13, 2017. Andrew Hamm covers the announcement for this blog.
Orin Kerr is the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School. One of the most basic ideas in Fourth Amendment law is what you might call the eyewitness rule: The government can always talk to eyewitnesses.
Alan Butler is senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which filed amici briefs in support of petitioner David Riley in Riley v. California and in support of respondent Antoine Jones in United States v. Jones.
Briefly: To mark the 25th anniversary of Justice Clarence Thomas’ appointment to the Supreme Court, the Yale Law Journal offers a collection of essays exploring various aspects of Thomas’ jurisprudence.
This past term, while the Supreme Court was on its winter break, First Mondays released a special two-episode series called “101 First Street.” The series is designed to serve as an introduction to how the Supreme Court works for nonexperts and nonlawyers.
David LaBahn is president and CEO of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. As people have become more reliant on cellular devices, so too has law enforcement become more reliant on using the information contained on, or generated by, these devices to investigate crime.
Jennifer Lynch is a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of Timothy Carpenter’s petition for certiorari in Carpenter v. United States.
Briefly: At The Narrowest Grounds, Asher Steinberg argues that the court’s opinion in Advocate Health Care Network v. Stapleton, which held that a pension plan maintained by a church-affiliated group qualifies for ERISA’s church-plan exemption no matter who established the plan, “exhibits three
Jim Harper is vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, he filed an amicus brief for the institute in support of Timothy Carpenter’s petition for certiorari in Carpenter v. United States.