Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

UPDATE 7 p.m.  Monday:  Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll, citing today’s Supreme Court order, argue in letter to 2d Circuit that the order makes moot the Trump effort to undo the payment of the $5.6 million verdict to Carroll.  They claim the Trump appeal depended on getting rehearing in the Supreme Court. —————————————————– The Supreme… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down, for the second time this year, a plea by President Trump to nullify a New York jury’s verdict of more than $5 million for a woman writer who sued him for sexual assault. The Court issued a brief order as part of a list of routine legal actions… Read More

President Trump is claiming the power to bar foreign women from entering the U.S. to have babies; he wants to make sure their children can’t become American citizens.  He seems convinced that a recent Supreme Court ruling against him on that constitutional point is not a problem. A new Executive Order signed by the President last week… Read More

President Trump has now won, from an extremely reluctant federal judge, a final victory over all of the criminal cases against his political allies who staged a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol more than five years ago. In a 15-page decision issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta in Washington, D.C., granted Trump’s… Read More

The ever-changing $1.8 billion fund deal that President Trump and his Cabinet put together to benefit his political allies got a new revision Sunday night – but maybe only as a political document.  Its legal status is still in doubt. Trump’s plan to transfer the huge sum of U.S. Treasury money to hundreds of his followers… Read More

Official Washington was absorbed on Friday in the politics surrounding President Trump’s highly controversial $1.8 billion fund for payoffs from the U.S. Treasury to his allies.  In a federal court in Florida – also on Friday — it became clear that the legal feud over the fund is becoming a major constitutional controversy, too. Since the… Read More

President Trump returned to the Supreme Court Tuesday night, seeking new clarity on how far the Court will go to protect him when he is found to have broken the law.  The appeal is an attempt to elevate to constitutional dignity the sordid scandal of a sexual assault accusation that led to jury verdicts against him,… Read More

A Florida federal judge, in one of the most blistering public criticisms yet of a sitting President, ruled Monday that Donald Trump gravely misused the court system to benefit himself, his family, his business and their friends and allies. The judge all but erased the legal basis for the $1.8 billion “slush fund” set up… Read More

Reaching back into 17th Century English history and relying anew on the burst of new civil rights after America’s Civil War, a deeply divided Supreme Court on Tuesday assured U.S. citizenship as a constitutional right of every child born in this country. The decision frustrates an effort by President Trump to take away citizenship for any… Read More

Pressing on with its controversial agenda to build up the power of the President, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the nation’s Chief Executive can fire almost any official in the Executive Branch without having to give any reason. By a vote of 6-to-3, the Court overruled a 91-year-old precedent that had limited the… Read More