After years of battling in lower courts between the nation’s No. 1 and No. 2 makers of smartphones, that billion-dollar-plus feud over patent rights reached the Supreme Court on Monday — maybe only the first of several potential appeals. This thoroughly modern case is actually an attempt to get the Court to take up an… Read More
States get a bit more time for immigration reply
This post also appears on scotusblog.com The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted twenty-six states an extra eight days to file their response to the Obama administration’s appeal in defense of its broad new immigration policy. That extension — considerably less than the added thirty days the states had sought — makes it more likely that… Read More
January’s argument schedule
The Supreme Court on Tuesday released the schedule of oral arguments for the sitting that begins on Monday, January 11. The first case to be heard is one of the most significant of the Term: a test of whether non-union members in public jobs should be freed from paying any dues or fees to the… Read More
States seek delay of immigration case
This post also appears on scotusblog.com. Lawyers for the twenty-six states that challenged President Barack Obama’s broad policy to delay the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants asked the Supreme Court on Monday to give them more time to answer the government’s appeal. Delay has the potential to slow down a case that U.S. officials very much want decided… Read More
Finally, a constitutional ruling on NSA phone taps
After more than nine years of the National Security Agency’s massive telephone tapping program, and a series of court challenges to it, the program finally got a federal appeals court judge’s constitutional blessing on Friday. U.S. Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh pronounced the data sweeps program to be “entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment.”
Test of immigration policy reaches the Court
Acting swiftly to try to get a Supreme Court decision by next summer, the Obama administration on Friday filed the opening papers in United States v. Texas — the epic battle over who controls U.S. immigration policy. The appeal was filed just eleven days after a federal appeals court had blocked enforcement of the policy, which… Read More
Prompt appeal of House health care challenge blocked
A federal trial judge in Washington, D.C., refused on Monday to allow the Obama administration to pursue an immediate appeal testing the House of Representatives’ right to sue in a dispute over federal spending under the new health care law.
Pondering an issue that’s not at stake — or is it?
The Supreme Court took about two hours on Wednesday to hear six lawyers (one of them twice), but at the end it appeared that an issue the Justices had declined to take up may have to be. Thus arose a question that maybe only a law professor — or an appellate lawyer — could love. Can… Read More
Is Puerto Rico just a colony under Congress’s control?
A version of this post appeared Friday on Constitution Daily, the blog of the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia. ——————- From the time the Constitution was written, Congress has had clear authority to “make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States.” That is what Article IV says… Read More
Unionizing of college football players stalls
The attempt by college football players at Northwestern University to set up a labor union to bargain for health and other protection stalled at the National Labor Relations Board on Monday, as the five-member panel decided unanimously against taking up the legal claim. By not settling the issue, however, the board stressed that it was… Read More