Showing 1–50 of 97 items published in May 2014, most recent first.
Arguing that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is in conflict with itself over gay rights issues, Idaho’s governor on Friday asked that court to put the state’s same-sex marriage appeal on a faster track.
Briefly: With the end of June and the Justices’ summer recess now just a month away, Ilya Shapiro previews the last few weeks of the Term at Cato at Liberty and provides his predictions for some of the remaining high-profile cases.
John Elwood reviews Tuesday’s relisted cases. Greetings Court fans, and welcome back to another edition of Relist Watch. As (both) our regular readers are well aware, we here at Relist Watch are hustlers, not ballplayers, but we still work hard not to throw wide of the mark.
In 1991, Professor Bill Eskridge published a landmark empirical study showing that Congress frequently overrode the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation decisions.
From time to time (as it did two Mondays ago and again this week), the Court will invite the Solicitor General to file a brief expressing the views of the United States on cases in which petitions for certiorari have been filed.
Just over four years after the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the British oil giant BP PLC asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to put on hold lower court rulings that it contends would mandate hundreds of millions of dollars in unconstitutional payments on damage claims.
We are happy to present the next edition of our October Term 2013 Stat Pack. As the Court turns the corner into the last month of the Term, several key trends are beginning to reveal themselves. You can view the Stat Pack in its entirety here.
Coverage of and commentary on Tuesday’s orders and opinions continue. In The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin covers the decision in Hall v. Florida, in which the Court held unconstitutional Florida’s requirement that defendants facing the death penalty show an IQ test score of 70 or below before being permitted to submit additional evidence regarding their intellectual disability.
At its Conference on May 29, 2014, the Court will consider petitions seeking review of issues such as the preclusive effect of alternative holdings, preemption of state law nuisance claims under the Clean Air Act, and protection for journalists subpoenaed to reveal the identity of confidential sources.
If Memorial Day is the unofficial start to summer, the day after Memorial Day appeared to be the unofficial start of the home stretch for the Justices, who issued orders (along with a per curiam opinion) and four opinions in argued cases yesterday morning.
UPDATED Wednesday 3:10 p.m. Justice Kennedy has called for a response to this application by 1 p.m. next Monday.
In a five-to-four decision yesterday, the Supreme Court held that Michigan’s lawsuit against the Bay Mills Indian Community to enjoin a tribal casino operating outside of Indian lands was barred by tribal sovereign immunity.
In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports on a new study by Richard Lazarus of Harvard Law School, who chronicles how the Court has been “quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice.” “The revisions,” Lazarus notes, “include
The order list is here. The opinion in Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community is here. The opinion in Plumhoff v. Rickard is here. The opinion in Wood v. Moss is here. The opinion in Hall v. Florida is here.
Analysis Twelve years after leaving it to the states to decide when an individual convicted of murder was too intellectually incapacitated to be executed, a divided Supreme Court on Tuesday withdrew some of that discretion.
Native Americans rarely win at the Court. But win they did today . . . at least on this issue and for now. In Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community, the Court divided five to four in an unusual line-up to hold that Michigan’s lawsuit against the tribe, seeking to block the tribe’s establishment of a casino on non-Indian lands, is barred by sovereign immunity.
Expanding the authority of police to use deadly force to stop a high-speed chase on streets and highways, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police may start shooting at the fleeing vehicle and keep on shooting until they are satisfied that the threat to safety is at an end.
In an opinion filled with chilling, repeated references to being within shooting or grenade-throwing distance of the president, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that the Secret Service did not engage in unconstitutional censorship when its agents moved protesters out of range of a president as he dined on an outdoor restaurant patio.
Illustrating that it can take some time for the Supreme Court just to state the obvious, the Justices on Tuesday — after their thirteenth opportunity to look at the case — decided an Illinois dispute by finding that a lower court’s error in it was “manifest” and that the rule of law could not be clearer.
We are live blogging this morning as orders and opinions are issued. Please click this link to be taken to the live blog page.
On Monday the Court was closed in observance of Memorial Day. On Tuesday the Court issued orders from it May 22 Conference, granting one new case and calling for the views of the Solicitor General in two others, and handed down opinions in four argued cases.
Briefly: At The Atlantic, Dahlia Lithwick reviews Scalia: A Court of One, a new book on Justice Antonin Scalia by Bruce Murphy. She acknowledges that “Murphy may be correct that Scalia is a court of one.” “But,” she added, “in the religious-rights revival now in progress in America, one is perhaps all that is needed.
John Elwood reviews Monday’s relisted cases. We interrupt this blog with breaking (well, broken) news: You heard it here first, second, third, and fourth. The Justices may have their problems, but soon Ryan v. Hurles, 12-1472, will no longer be one of them.
U.S. Circuit Judge Randall R. Rader on Friday said he will step down next Friday as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Later, he issued a letter of apology for an ethical lapse.
We have recently learned that Chris Vasil, the longtime Deputy Clerk of the Supreme Court, plans to retire effective September 1. For decades, Chris has been an endlessly calm and patient presence at the Court for those of us outside the Court, answering any and all questions promptly, thoroughly, and with good humor.
In a case that tests whether execution is forbidden because a death-row inmate’s unusual physical condition raises too great a risk of serious pain in the process, the Supreme Court on Wednesday evening blocked the scheduled death of a Missouri inmate and told a federal appeals court to sort out the dispute.
Last night the Court blocked the execution of a Missouri death row inmate who contended that a medical condition could complicate the state’s plans to execute him by lethal injection.
On Friday, May 23, we will be appealing the decision by the Senate Press Gallery’s Standing Committee of Correspondents declining to renew Lyle Denniston’s SCOTUSblog press credential. The appeal will […]
The petitions of the day are: Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama 13-895 Issue: (1) Whether a state violates the requirement of one person, one vote by enacting a state legislative redistricting plan that results in large and unnecessary population deviations for local legislative
With one judge suggesting that the Supreme Court has sent “a clear message” that it does not want rulings nullifying state bans on same-sex marriage to go into effect while they are being challenged in appeals by state officials, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Tuesday evening temporarily barred such marriages in Idaho.
It has been more than two weeks since the Court’s decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, upholding a New York town’s practice of beginning its town council meetings with a prayer, but commentary on the decision continues.
At its Conference on May 22, 2014, the Court will consider petitions seeking review of issues such as the validity of an Alabama redistricting plan under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the scope of an anti-retaliation provision under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the standard to determine a “true threat” under the First Amendment.
Yesterday the Court issued its decision in the copyright case Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, holding that the movie studio cannot invoke the doctrine of laches as a bar to the pursuit of a claim for damages brought within the three-year window established by Section 507(b) of the Copyright Act.
I have recently come to the view that one of the most profound and pervasive issues beneath the surface of most cases in constitutional and public law is how the Court approaches the task of evaluating the actions of other institutions of government.
There has been a lot of public discussion and press attention about the Supreme Court’s decisions on campaign finance law, which can be a very complicated topic (especially for non-lawyers). So I thought it would be useful to write a short Explainer on what the Court is up to.
UPDATED Wednesday 3:21 p.m. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett announced on Wednesday afternoon that the state would not appeal Judge Jones’ ruling. That would make Pennsylvania the nineteenth state in which same-sex marriage is legal — assuming that the attempt to appeal in the Oregon case by a non-government entity fails.
The Supreme Court no doubt has expended considerable labor on Ryan v. Hurles since it first started looking at the case last September. The Arizona murder case showed up before the Court at every Conference since then.
On Friday, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a new decision in Ryan v. Hurles, an Arizona habeas case that has been repeatedly relisted since late September.
The order list is here. The Court has granted one new case, Department of Homeland Security v. MacLean, and called for the views of the Solicitor General in one case, OBB Personenverkehr AG v. Sachs. The opinion in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. is here.
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to settle the scope of a federal government employee’s right to go public with a claim of misconduct by that worker’s agency, setting up a clash of public safety vs. national security.
A big day for the Ninth Circuit. For the first time this Term, a Justice voted to affirm the Ninth Circuit! Unfortunately, only three Justices voted in favor of the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, so the Ninth Circuit was still reversed.
UPDATED 7:28 p.m. The very rapid pace of developments on same-sex marriage continued Monday. In Utah, a federal judge ruled that the state must recognize the marriages of some 1,300 same-sex couples who were wed in a seventeen-day period of opportunity between a federal judge’s decision against the state ban and the Supreme Court’s temporary order blocking that ruling.
We are live blogging this morning as orders and opinions are issued. Please click this link to be taken to the live blog page.
On Monday the Court granted one new case and called for the views of the Solicitor General in another case. Lyle reported on the orders. On Monday the Court also issued its decision in Petrella v. MGM, which Ronald Mann reported on. An archive of Monday’s live-blog is here.
An Arizona murder case that the Supreme Court has had before it at every one of its twenty-one private Conferences so far this Term, but with no action on it yet, is almost certain to be strung out further.
Commentary on partisanship and the Court continues with an op-ed from Michael McGough of the Los Angeles Times, who describes himself as “struck by how the controversy over whether the Supreme Court justices have become more partisan in recent years parallels a phenomenon I discovered when writing
If Congress were to give the government the option of closing the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and allow prisoners from there to be kept in prisons in the United States, the government will continue to keep them outside of the usual legal system, the Obama administration has told Congress in a new report.
The recent, rather high-profile mistake and correction by Justice Antonin Scalia in a dissenting opinion raises the question of how the process of publishing decisions – and correcting them – works at the Supreme Court.
The on-again, off-again story of same-sex couples getting marriage licenses in Arkansas came to another stop on Friday afternoon as the state supreme court blocked a state trial judge’s ruling to nullify all laws barring such marriages and refusing to recognize those married elsewhere.
With the sixtieth anniversary of the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education now just two days away, Education Week devotes much of its current issue to the case and its legacy.