Lyle Denniston

Feb 27 2017

Trump team drops challenge to Texas voter ID law

The Trump Administration on Monday moved to abandon the effort, begun by the Obama administration and civil rights advocates more than three years ago, to prove that the nation’s strictest voter ID law is unconstitutional. The Texas law, though, will continue to face that challenge because the rights groups plan to continue it before a… Read More

Feb 23 2017

Court seeks views on transgender policy switch

The Supreme Court wants both sides in the significant case on transgender students’ rights to submit their views on the possible impact of the switch in policy on those rights by the Trump Administration.  The Court’s Clerk on Thursday afternoon asked for responses by letter, due by 2 p.m. next Wednesday. The Clerk, no doubt… Read More

Feb 22 2017

Obama’s transgender policy formally abandoned

Two federal agencies of the Trump Administration on Wednesday evening notified the Supreme Court and school officials across the nation that the federal government will no longer require that transgender students get access to bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identites.   A two-page policy statement thus formally overturned the approach followed for the… Read More

Feb 21 2017

Trump team to change transgender policy

The Trump Administration plans to move shortly to abandon the federal government’s policy of defending equal rights for transgender students, but the switch may not prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the issue in its current term. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in his daily briefing for news reporters, said that “further guidance”… Read More

Feb 16 2017

New Trump order on immigration coming

With President Trump and his aides now rewriting the controversial executive order to strictly limit immigration of foreign nationals from the Mideast, the administration’s lawyers chose on Thursday not to seek a federal court’s permission to enforce the first version, currently on hold. It is far from clear, however, that these new developments will end… Read More

Feb 13 2017

Probing background of Trump immigration order

Lawyers for two states challenging President Trump’s sweeping limits on immigration could soon get the chance to demand information from key government officials on how they put together that executive order, and what they intended it to do. That opportunity could result from a new order issued Monday afternoon by a federal trial judge in Seattle… Read More

Feb 11 2017

Crucial week for immigration limits

President Trump’s attempt to strictly limit immigration of people from Mideast nations, stalled for now by court orders, moves into a new and important phase in the coming week.  The White House may produce an entirely new order, even as two federal courts will be pondering their next legal steps. The President, in comments Friday to reporters traveling… Read More

Feb 10 2017

Analysis: A constitutional lesson for a new president

“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” “To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say ‘what the law is‘.” When the U.S. Constitution was still in… Read More

Feb 9 2017

Appeals court rebuffs Trump on immigration

Rebuffing the Trump Administration’s sweeping claim of unchecked presidential power and insisting on the power of the federal courts to safeguard individual liberties, a federal appeals court on Thursday kept in force a temporary ban on the White House order sharply limiting immigration of people from the Mideast. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the… Read More

Feb 7 2017

Trump’s own words a factor on immigration ban’s legal fate?

President Donald Trump’s public pleas for a ban on Muslims entering the United States could turn out to be a threat to the legality of his executive order imposing immigration restrictions, or so it appeared after a federal appeals court held a historic hearing Tuesday afternoon on that order. Although the order in specific terms… Read More

Lyle Denniston continues to write about the U.S. Supreme Court, although he “retired” at the end of 2019 following more than six decades on that news beat. He was there for three revolutions – civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights – and the start of a fourth, on transgender rights. His career of following the law began at the Otoe County Courthouse in his hometown, Nebraska City, Nebraska, in the fall of 1948. His online, eight-week, college-level course – “The Supreme Court and American Politics” – is available from the University of Baltimore Law School, and it is free.

Recent Posts

  • Trump’s power to deport curbed
  • How will the Court rule on citizenship?
  • Will Trump fire the Fed chief?
  • Court steps into historic citizenship dispute
  • Is President Trump defying the Supreme Court?
PREV 1 … 69 70 71 … 82 NEXT
Site built and optimized by Sound Strategies