Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

In a hearing Tuesday, the Supreme Court will again examine two of the most contested issues in American politics: how to make voting equal for minorities and how to draw fair election districts.  In a second hearing, the Justices will examine military veterans’ right to disability benefits. The Court will broadcast “live” the audio of… Read More

Opening day of the Supreme Court’s new term on Monday will focus on hearings about two kinds of property rights: the right to build on private property when that might lead to pollution of a nearby waterway (a modern dispute about the environment) and the right of state governments to take ownership of private financial… Read More

On Friday night, the Biden Administration’s Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to speed up its review of a federal case over government seizure of secret documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar a Lago resort in Florida. The after-hours filing with the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals was clearly aimed at shutting down… Read More

The Supreme Court, joined by a history-making new Justice but deeply immersed in controversy that has put its future in serious question, begins a new term on Monday. With the public allowed back into the Court’s hearings for the first time in two and a half years, the spectators will see the first black woman… Read More

A year and eight months after Donald Trump left the White House, carrying with him a large trove of documents that he had no right to take, the controversy is still far from being sorted out.  Here are the most important questions still unanswered: Why did he take what he took?  Where did he put… Read More

Voters in Kansas, among the most conservative in the nation, bluntly ordered their state legislature on Tuesday not to take away a woman’s right to abortion – guaranteed since 2019 under the state constitution. As of early this morning, with 96.7 percent of the votes counted, a measure proposed by the legislature seeking authority to… Read More

A constitutional right that has some of its origins in the famous Great Charter (“Magna Carta”) in 13th Century England has been a source over many decades of some of the most important rights enjoyed by Americans.  It is the somewhat opaque “right of due process,” a basic guarantee that protects people from arbitrary government… Read More

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