Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

Continuing its energetic campaign to narrow the power of federal regulatory agencies, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Thursday stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of authority to write industry-wide curbs on emission of air pollution by electricity-generating plants. Without a specific new grant of authority from Congress, the Court’s 6-to-3 decision declared, EPA must mainly… Read More

The Supreme Court today took on the dramatic and historic assignment of ruling on the power of state legislatures to exercise unchecked control over elections for Congress and the Presidency.  At the center of that constitutional controversy is the theory that President Trump and his allies used in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election… Read More

Pushing religion further into the midst of American public life, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled on Monday that a teacher or coach has a constitutional right to pray during a public school event. The 6-to-3 majority continued its energetic campaign to revise the modern Constitution by overruling liberal precedents, as it had done just… Read More

For the first time in the nation’s 233-year history, the Supreme Court on Friday erased a constitutional right.  Five of the Court’s conservative Justices joined to overrule Roe v. Wade and also a later ruling that reinforced that basic decision. What that means, and the Court majority said this was exactly what it intended, is… Read More

With much of the nation deeply worried over gun violence and with even a usually reluctant Congress ready to take some action, the Supreme Court by a 6-to-3 vote on Thursday created a new, broad and difficult-to-limit constitutional right to carry a concealed firearm in public. It took the Justices five opinions totaling 135 pages… Read More

Sharply narrowing the remaining constitutional separation between government and religion, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that public money grants cannot be denied to parents just because they will use it to pay for religious education of their children. The 6-to-3 decision, in a case from Maine, goes considerably further than the Court had ever gone… Read More

In a creative but – at best — long-shot attempt to get the Supreme Court to reopen its review of abortion rights, a women’s equality group in North Carolina argued Monday that those rights are already secured by the Equal Rights Amendment.  One key problem: ERA is not yet a part of the Constitution, although… Read More

This is the final of three articles in this series.  This part analyzes the potential that the constitutional right of privacy, in a variety of modern forms, may be at risk if the Supreme Court goes through with a draft decision to end the right to abortion. ********** A Supreme Court decision is something like… Read More

This is the second of three articles.  This part deals with the way the Supreme Court, according to a draft of an opinion, would implement a decision to end the constitutional right to abortion. ********** Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., has stirred up a wide array of questions about what his draft Supreme Court opinion… Read More

This is the first of three articles.  This part discusses the arguments made in the draft of a potential Supreme Court opinion that would overrule the Court’s two most important decisions on the right to abortion.  The draft was leaked to the public last week. *********** The Supreme Court is pulled in opposite directions when… Read More