Twenty-four hours after giving constitutional backing for Arizona’s use of an independent commission to draw new election district maps for its members of Congress, the Supreme Court on Tuesday took on a case complaining that the same state agency wrongly used race and partisanship in crafting state legislative district boundaries.
Jun 23 2015
Pressing the ACA birth-control issue
This post also appears on scotusblog.com The federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate moved again on Tuesday to make sure that the Justices are keeping up with the government’s success in heading off a round of new challenges to the birth-control mandate in the Affordable Care Act. In the second letter of its kind, Solicitor General… Read More
Jun 22 2015
Is the New Deal in new trouble?
This post also appears on scotusblog.com One of the more durable legacies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s was the idea that the farm economy can be bolstered by paying growers to keep some of their crop off the market, or paying them not to grow some of it at all. One of those programs… Read More
Jun 19 2015
Texas abortion case reaches the Court
This post also appears on scotusblog.com Abortion clinics and doctors in Texas asked the Supreme Court on Friday night to delay enforcement of a 2013 state abortion law while an appeal to the Justices is pursued. Without a postponement, the lengthy application said, more than half of the existing nineteen clinics in Texas will have… Read More
Jun 12 2015
Appeals court sharply narrows war crimes prosecutions
This post also appears on scotusblog.com In a ruling that significantly narrows Congress’s power to use military courts to try war crimes cases, a result likely to be tested in the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday threw out the last remaining conviction of a propagandist for… Read More
Jun 12 2015
Abortion case on fast track to the Court?
This post also appears on scotusblog.com Expecting that one side or the other will quickly take the dispute on to the Supreme Court, lawyers for abortion doctors and clinics in Texas on Friday asked a federal appeals court to rule by next Friday on the next step in the case. The challengers to new abortion… Read More
Jun 9 2015
UPDATED: Out-of-state abortion access as an alternative
This post, also appearing on scotusblog.com, was updated Wednesday to note the filing of a postponement request to the Fifth Circuit Court by abortion clinics and doctors. With the Supreme Court poised to act soon on the constitutionality of abortion regulations that would mean women must leave the state to have the procedure, a federal appeals court ruled… Read More
Jun 8 2015
Walking on a tightrope on Mideast policy
This post also appears on scotusblog.com Insisting that it was staying out of Mideast politics and that it was not shutting Congress out of foreign policymaking, a divided Supreme Court on Monday struck down a thirteen-year-old law allowing Americans born in the bitterly contested city of Jerusalem to claim that they were born in Israel. It… Read More
Jun 5 2015
UPDATED: Same-sex marriage reaches Guam
UPDATED Monday: The judge’s opinion explaining the decision is now available, here. A federal judge in the U.S. territory of Guam ruled on Friday that its law against same-sex marriage can no longer be enforced, news reports have indicated. U.S. District Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood made her decision from the bench after a hearing on a… Read More
Jun 1 2015
Internet threats still in legal limbo?
This post also appears on scotusblog.com The Supreme Court moved into the new realm of violent speech on the Internet with the aim of clarifying the legal risk. It insisted Monday that it had done so, at least part of the way, but two Justices argued that instead only confusion had resulted. It is not even… Read More
