Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

The Supreme Court, on holiday today, returns to the bench tomorrow for a hearing on a familiar topic: claims of government discrimination against religious groups.  In a second hearing Tuesday, it will be dealing with another recurring topic: who owns famous art objects seized by the Nazis during the Holocaust? “Live” audio (no video) of… Read More

Flexing its judicial muscle as the Supreme Court has not done in generations, the Court’s new conservative majority of six Justices on Thursday blocked the Biden Administration policy that sought to impose nationwide protection of more than 84 million workers from the deadly Covid-19 virus. The ruling was far broader than anything the conservative majority… Read More

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court turns once again to the age-old question of how government can – or should – make allowances for mistakes people make in fulfilling their legal duties.  The case being heard turns on when the federal government can relax a formal legal deadline.  Specifically, the case is about a tax deadline,… Read More

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will once again attempt to find its way through the bewildering maze that is immigration law, with a new look at the lingering issue of the federal government’s power to keep non-citizens in detention while they await being deported.  The two cases to be heard tomorrow unfold against a broad… Read More

On Monday, the Supreme Court – back on its regular schedule — returns to the very complex task of trying to make sense of the widely varied and sometimes conflicting parts of the nation’s healthcare system. The task has always been harder because of America’s century-old fear of “socialized medicine.” That fear has led the… Read More

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court returns early from its holiday recess to confront a controversy that may well rank as one of the most important in modern constitutional history.  But it will be doing so by a peculiar and rushed procedure, one that it very seldom uses. In the two hours of scheduled hearings Friday morning,… Read More

Almost a year out of office but still trying to push the outer limits of the Constitution, former President Donald Trump is back at the Supreme Court for another try. This time, he is attempting to claim a part of a presidential prerogative that President Joe Biden now holds. It is a “privilege” that goes… Read More

Acting speedily, Texas state officials asked a federal appeals court on Thursday to hand over to the Texas Supreme Court a new plea to stop clinics from challenging that state’s strict new abortion ban (so-called “SB8”). The officials acted without waiting for that case to formally return from the Supreme Court to the U.S. Court… Read More

Four days after the Supreme Court left abortion clinics and doctors in Texas with only a narrow way to challenge that state’s restrictive abortion ban in the federal courts, four state officials have made plans to try to block that path. In a filing made public Tuesday by the Supreme Court, the officials whose duties… Read More

Leaving unsettled a pregnant woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, the Supreme Court on Friday allowed Texas to continue for now to enforce the strictest ban in the nation but cleared the way for a variety of new court challenges to it. While the Justices split in at least a half-dozen different ways, the overall… Read More