Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

A federal judge, the first in history to rule on the meaning of the Constitution’s ban on gifts and other compensation for the President (other than salary), used that interpretation on Thursday to dismiss a lawsuit against President Trump and his businesses. While the judge ruled that the case could not proceed because the challengers could… Read More

The Supreme Court plans to take up at its first private conference in the new year the intense, ongoing fight over an unsettled constitutional question – do undocumented immigrant teenagers who are pregnant have a right to an abortion? That question remains open even though three of those young women have had abortions or are… Read More

In a rare and perhaps unprecedented ruling, the Supreme Court on Wednesday took control of a federal trial court’s management of the flow of documents in the pre-trial stage of a pending case.  It did so in a high-profile case challenging the legality of the Trump Administration’s decision to end the program that has protected… Read More

The Trump Administration on Tuesday night voluntarily withdrew its plea to a federal appeals court to prevent a young immigrant woman from being released from detention to have an abortion. It did so after the government released her from custody, thus apparently giving her freedom to go ahead with an abortion if she still wishes… Read More

The Trump Administration, in simultaneous filings on Monday, asked both the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court to block an undocumented immigrant teenager, now being held in a federal detention center, from having an abortion. The plea to the Supreme Court was both a request for immediate postponement of such an abortion, and a… Read More

Finding that the Trump Administration had no legal authority to create sweeping exemptions to the birth-control mandate under the Affordable Care Act, and ruling that the new rules potentially could cause “enormous and irreversible harm” to women across the nation, a federal trial judge on Friday temporarily barred the enforcement of the rules anywhere in… Read More

The Trump Administration notified a federal appeals court Tuesday that it continues to support the plea of a controversial former Arizona sheriff that he should have his criminal contempt-of-court conviction erased.  It will argue, as it did previously in a federal trial court, that President Trump’s pardon in August of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio should have… Read More

Still insisting that the Pentagon will not be ready to accept transgender recruits into the military on January 1, even though that process was put in motion one day ago, the Trump Administration moved to a higher federal court late on Monday to seek a postponement. In a filing at the U.S. Court of Appeals… Read More

In three weeks, transgender individuals seeking to enlist in U.S. military forces may start joining up.  The Pentagon made that announcement Monday within hours after a federal judge refused the Trump Administration’s request to put such enlistments on hold. U.S. District Judge Kolleen Kollar-Kotelly, remarking that the Pentagon has had nearly a year and a… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday acted – probably because of procedural reasons – to leave undecided at least for now the spreading controversy over whether federal civil rights laws give protection to workers and students who are gay, lesbian or transgender. Without offering any explanation – and, significantly, without any noted dissents – the Justices… Read More