Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

In a sweeping endorsement of presidential power over who may enter the United States and a huge political victory for President Trump, a deeply divided Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld his order barring most foreign travelers from five Mideast nations with mostly Muslim populations. “The admission and exclusion of foreign nationals is a fundamental sovereign… Read More

Choosing – for now – to go to the sidelines on two highly controversial constitutional issues, the Supreme Court on Monday turned aside cases that could have given lower courts some new guidance on the rights of married gay couples and on the validity of partisan gerrymandering. In brief orders, the Court sent the cases… Read More

The Trump Administration, frustrated that lower courts have blocked it from ending a six-year-old program protecting young undocumented immigrants from deportation and that the Supreme Court has so far not come to its aid, has now laid out a new plan that could put the issue back before the Justices in a matter of weeks. … Read More

For the first time, the Trump Administration moved on Thursday to challenge the constitutionality of the key section of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) that required most Americans to buy health insurance or pay a financial penalty as part of their taxes.  The so-called individual insurance mandate is beyond Congress’s power, the new filing argued,… Read More

Three years after finding a constitutional right for gay and lesbian couples to get married, the Supreme Court chose on Monday to take a cautious path in spelling out how much protection their marital choice will get from government.  In a 7-2 ruling in a high-profile wedding cake case from Colorado, the Justices chose to… Read More

Overtaken by changing developments in lower courts, the Supreme Court acted narrowly on Monday o end one of the challenges to the Trump Administration policy of refusing to allow abortions for undocumented teenagers being held in official detention centers after entering the country illegally.  In a five-page, unsigned opinion, the Court said the initial test… Read More

A new lawsuit in defense of women’s right to an abortion landed in a state trial court in Des Moines, Iowa, this week, and everyone involved already has a good idea of how it will come out in Iowa’s courts. But that’s not the point. What counts more is what happens to the case if… Read More

Continuing its pattern of refusing to clarify the gun rights that are protected by the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court has turned aside a claim that gun merchants have their own constitutional right to sell firearms.  An appeal in a California case was the first to ask the Justices to expand the Amendment to protect… Read More

In a broad reaffirmation of the constitutional idea that Congress cannot order state governments to carry out federal policies, the Supreme Court on Monday went further than it has done in the past to shore up states’ sovereign powers. It did so as it struck down all parts of a 1992 federal law passed to… Read More

From the day 15 months ago when the first challenger sued President Trump over his plan to restrict entry to the U.S. of foreign nationals from Muslim-majority nations, a central question always has been: how will the judges react to the President’s many statements or tweets about why he wanted to do that?  That remains… Read More