Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

A part of government anti-immigrant policy that President Trump and his aides pursued throughout their four years in office reached its end on Friday in a federal courthouse in California.  The aim was to exclude up to 11 million undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2020 census.  Trump’s legal team told a federal judge… Read More

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will complete this week’s hearings with review of the legal tools that the Federal Trade Commission can use against those who use deceptive credit schemes to cheat consumers.  The hearing will be conducted remotely because of the pandemic.  The audio portion of the hearing, but not the video, is expected… Read More

In 1868, America wrote into its Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment.  It has had immense importance in giving birth to and nurturing the modern civil rights revolution.  There is a part of it that, on re-reading, seems at first to be out of date.  However, if Section 3 of the Amendment is not a dead letter… Read More

For several years, Maryland’s Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin (District 8) has been pursuing the idea that Congress should have a role in putting in motion the constitutional process for dealing with a disabled or mentally unfit president.   The storming of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters last Wednesday may have pushed that idea closer to… Read More

Guided by a couple centuries of tradition, plus some phrases from the Constitution, an 1887 federal law, and congressional rules, but maybe delayed for hours by political mischief, America’s 46th President – Joe Biden — could finally be elected tomorrow.  Or, perhaps, that might not happen until the wee hours of Thursday. Both houses of… Read More

In a significant – even if temporary – win for President Trump in his waning days in office, the Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump Administration to go ahead with an attempt to exclude up to 4 or 5 million undocumented immigrants from this year’s census count.  The vote appeared to be 6-to-3. If… Read More

Next month, just after Joe Biden is set to win the final vote count for President, the Supreme Court will take a serious look at a constitutional dispute left over from the election campaign.  The Court’s clerk on Wednesday sent to all of the Justices’ chambers, for discussion in private on January 8, two appeals… Read More

The Supreme Court, in the most important court ruling in the frenzied post-election effort to stop Joe Biden from becoming President, cleared the way Friday evening for the Electoral College to elect him when it meets on Monday. In three brief but historic sentences, at least five Justices (and maybe more), put an end to… Read More

Today, the Supreme Court finishes up the current series of public hearings for the December sitting, with a 90-minute session on the financial woes of the two giants in the home mortgage field, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  After nearly collapsing in the housing market crisis of 2008, the two sort-of-private entities have been watched… Read More

Bypassing all lower courts, the state of Texas is moving directly in the Supreme Court with what may be the boldest constitutional challenge in the history of presidential elections: stop four other states from casting their electoral votes for Joe Biden next Monday. Texas’s aim emerged clearly in scores of pages of legal documents. It… Read More