Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

Striding boldly into the midst of America’s fierce modern debate over racial equality, a divided Supreme Court on Thursday struck down the use of race as a factor in deciding government benefits and privately-run programs that use federal funds. The 6-to-3 decision, applying explicitly to policies for deciding which students get admitted to colleges and… Read More

In a historic ruling with major impact on future elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and to the Presidency, the Supreme Court on Tuesday firmly rejected a sweeping and deeply controversial theory that would have given state legislatures unchecked power to displace voters’ choices for those offices. The 6-to-3 decision may also bolster the… Read More

A labor union for U.S. government employees moved on Tuesday to renew its constitutional challenge to the law putting a ceiling on federal debt, even though the threat of a default on the debt has now been averted – until at least late next year. The union, the National Association of Government Employees, filed a… Read More

Breaking – at least temporarily – from years of narrowing the protection for voting rights of America’s racial minorities, the Supreme Court appeared Thursday to have opened a real chance that blacks in Alabama may get a second seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as the Justices saved a key part of the most… Read More

Accusing a Senate committee of attempting to “embarrass and harass” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a private lawyer told the panel Tuesday that it has no power to investigate the jurist and no power to impose an ethics code on the Court or the Justices. In a seven-page, highly detailed “confidential” letter that became public,… Read More

President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notified a federal judge in Boston Monday that, at least for now, they will resist an attempt to get the courts to provide a temporary way out of the looming economic catastrophe if the nation hits the government’s debt limit. A federal employee labor union recently asked U.S…. Read More

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…”  Who wrote that?  A Google search tells us that it was Oscar Wilde.  But can we be sure?  Isn’t all creative expression – music, art, poetry, literature – borrowed or copied from someone else? That, strangely, is a fundamental cultural question that the Supreme Court tried to answer… Read More

If President Biden and the Republican House do not find a way in the next few weeks to avoid a global economic collapse over the national government’s debt, the courts might have a solution. In a new lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Boston, a group of private lawyers have put forth a… Read More

A series of new filings today in a historic Supreme Court case on voting rights put a hard question before the Justices: how eager are they to settle now, before the 2024 elections, a core constitutional issue about federal elections? Lawyers on all sides of the North Carolina congressional elections case, Moore v. Harper, on Thursday… Read More

The most important voting rights case now before the Supreme Court may be newly at risk of ending without a decision.  A recent decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court has raised the prospect that there may be nothing left for the Justices to decide. On Thursday, the Court told lawyers on all sides of… Read More