Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

In a setback for the Trump Administration, the Supreme Court refused on Monday to adopt a special, fast procedure to rule on the government’s power to shut down the program of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).  The brief order urged a federal appeals court to move “expeditiously” to decide an Administration appeal pending there,… Read More

A group of challengers who succeeded in a lower court on their claim that President Trump acted unconstitutionally in issuing the third version of his plan to block entry into the U.S. of foreign nationals from Muslim-majority nations asked the Supreme Court on Friday to review their case, too. This group specifically asked the Justices… Read More

A three-judge federal court in Harrisburg, PA, has refused – for now – to block Pennsylvania officials from going forward with plans to hold congressional elections this year using new districts drafted by the state’s Supreme Court. In a three-page order issued Friday afternoon, the panel indicated that it probably will not take any further… Read More

The Supreme Court on Friday picked the last scheduled day this term for hearings – April 25 – to hear lawyers argue the validity of President Trump’s plan to deny future entry to the U.S. of tens of millions of foreign nationals from six Muslim-majority nations. The April argument list issued Friday morning still left… Read More

Ten elected Republican legislators, state and federal, in Pennsylvania asked a federal court on Thursday to issue an immediate order barring the use of a new districting map drawn by the state Supreme Court in this year’s election of 18 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The claim of a violation of the federal… Read More

Arguing that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unconstitutionally seized the power to draw new congressional districts away from the state legislature, the two top Republican lawmakers in the state returned to the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday night with a plea to block the judge-drawn map.   The new request was filed 16 days after a similar plea… Read More

The Supreme Court on Tuesday chose to put off until Friday at the earliest its reaction to the Trump Administration appeal seeking approval for its plan to end the “DACA” program that protects young undocumented immigrants from deportation.   The case, involving the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” program, is now scheduled for discussion at a… Read More

Claiming full authority to do so, a deeply divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court drew up and released on Monday its own new map of congressional election districts – one that experts calculated would give Democratic candidates a realistic chance of picking up three or more seats than they have been able to win in the past… Read More

On Friday evening, the Supreme Court closed up shop for the holiday weekend without doing anything about DACA – that is, the Trump Administration’s appeal seeking review of its decision to shut down the program of “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.”  That program, in effect for well over five years, has allowed nearly 800,000 young… Read More

Using President Trump’s own words against him, a federal appeals court on Thursday added a second legal defeat for the White House’s latest attempt to bar the entry into the U.S. of people from six Muslim-majority nations.  A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the President’s purpose in issuing the… Read More