Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

In a creative but – at best — long-shot attempt to get the Supreme Court to reopen its review of abortion rights, a women’s equality group in North Carolina argued Monday that those rights are already secured by the Equal Rights Amendment.  One key problem: ERA is not yet a part of the Constitution, although… Read More

This is the final of three articles in this series.  This part analyzes the potential that the constitutional right of privacy, in a variety of modern forms, may be at risk if the Supreme Court goes through with a draft decision to end the right to abortion. ********** A Supreme Court decision is something like… Read More

This is the second of three articles.  This part deals with the way the Supreme Court, according to a draft of an opinion, would implement a decision to end the constitutional right to abortion. ********** Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., has stirred up a wide array of questions about what his draft Supreme Court opinion… Read More

This is the first of three articles.  This part discusses the arguments made in the draft of a potential Supreme Court opinion that would overrule the Court’s two most important decisions on the right to abortion.  The draft was leaked to the public last week. *********** The Supreme Court is pulled in opposite directions when… Read More

If America had a “Founding Mother,” it surely was Abigail Adams, the wise and witty “best friend” to her husband John.  She is remembered for many things, but perhaps most often for a letter she wrote to John in March 1776, when he was serving in the Continental Congress, writing laws to govern colonial America…. Read More

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., has ordered an investigation by Court staff of the source of last night’s leak of a draft opinion on the pending Mississippi abortion case. In doing so, the Court confirmed that the draft opinion was authentic, but cautioned that it is not final. It is not clear whether a… Read More

The last hearing of the Supreme Court’s current term will be held tomorrow, focusing on an attempt by the state of Oklahoma to overcome – at least partly – a devastating legal setback it had in the Court two years ago.  The state would have preferred that the Court use this new case to overrule… Read More

The Supreme Court’s hearings on Tuesday focus on basic disputes about federal courts’ monitoring of powers that the Constitution assigns elsewhere in government.  The first case is a test of federal court supervision of how Congress and the Executive Branch manage immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.  The second case involves states’ resistance to federal courts’… Read More

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court turns from a new school prayer controversy in the first hearing of the day, to a second potentially deeply divisive controversy – a major dispute over the death penalty.  Frustrated for years that the process of capital punishment stretches out for years and years, the Court is more or less continually… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday reopens two long-running controversies, core constitutional disputes that always divide the Court – and, in fact, divide the entire nation.  The first case being heard is about prayer at public schools, with the prospect that some of the Court’s longest-standing precedents on that issue are at risk of being overturned. … Read More