Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

The Supreme Court has just given itself a truly historic test: is it ready to take away much of the protection that federal law has long provided for racial minorities’ right to vote, because that is no longer needed? At the center of two orders the Justices have issued in recent days is the future… Read More

In a new and more revealing sign that the Supreme Court is on the verge of allowing President Trump to put partisan loyalists in all policy making posts in the federal Executive Branch, the Court on Wednesday gave him permission to fire three members of a half-century old consumer protection agency. The Court has done… Read More

Addinto the loss of women’s reproductive health choices, the last potential for constitutional protection failed in a federal court decision yesterday.  If that ruling holds after higher court review, any right to abortion may be gone.  Only Congress would still have power to provide nationwide protection – an unlikely prospect. The new ruling by a federal… Read More

Continuing to allow President Trump to take sweeping steps to shutter federal government functions, the Supreme Court on Monday permitted the firing of half of the staff of the U.S. Department of Education and other moves toward its total shutdown – without permission from Congress. Though the Court acted only temporarily, the completely unexplained order… Read More

Making a new test of courts’ power to block President Trump’s actions, a federal trial judge in New Hampshire on Thursday issued a sweeping order to protect the constitutional right of newborn babies to U.S. citizenship. U.S. District Judge Joseph N. LaPlante of Concord issued the order while reaching a new decision that Trump’s attempted… Read More

One of the Constitution’s most direct commands to the President is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”  And that simply means, two law professors once wrote, that a President’s “defiance [of a law] cannot be considered faithful execution.” But a law that Congress passed last year by large majorities, that has been… Read More

The Supreme Court today gave itself a historic and difficult assignment: to decide whether the Constitution’s guarantee of equality provides any protection for transgender people.  It ordered review of that issue in the emotionally-charged controversy over banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports. Separately, the Court agreed to decide whether a 1972 civil rights… Read More

On Monday, July 28, the maternity wards in hospitals across the country may face a dilemma: if a woman who is not a citizen has a baby there that day or later, will the hospital consider the child to be a citizen, or not?  How will the staff fill out the birth certificate? The 30-day… Read More

Enhancing in a major way the federal government’s power to enforce controversial new policies even though a lower court has declared them illegal, the Supreme Court on Friday erased almost all of the power of lower courts to issue nationwide orders. The 6-to-3 decision was a huge legal victory for the Trump Administration – and,… Read More

In another loss for American women from the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to turn their reproductive health care rights over to state control, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that they have no right under federal law to choose their own doctor. By a now-familiar 6-to-3 vote in major cases, the Court ruled that federal… Read More