Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

A federal judge in San Francisco suggested on Thursday that insurance companies who face an imminent cutoff by the Trump Administration of subsidies for providing health coverage for lower-income people may have a legal right to get those payments anyway. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria made the suggestion as he posed a series of questions… Read More

For the second time in the span of one day, President Trump’s latest attempt to bar entry to the U.S. by foreign nationals from Muslim nations has been blocked by a federal court.  Late Monday night, a Maryland judge imposed a nationwide order against enforcement, in a ruling that was broader than one issued earlier… Read More

President Trump’s third attempt to put strict new limits on immigration from Mideast nations – like the first two – ran into trouble in federal court on Tuesday, with a judge in Hawaii blocking it from going into full effect at midnight. (UPDATE: The Justice Department said it would pursue an “expeditious” appeal.) In a… Read More

Sending another strong signal that the troubled military commission system at Guantanamo Bay won’t be second-guessed by the Supreme Court, the Justices on Monday turned down an attempt to head off a major trial of a high-profile terrorism case.   This marked the second time within a week that the court chose to bypass a Guantanamo… Read More

Eighteen states and the local government in Washington, D.C., asked a federal trial judge on Friday to order the Trump Administration to continue paying billions of dollars in subsidies to health insurance companies to offset some of their costs of providing coverage for lower-income people under the Affordable Care Act. The plea was filed in… Read More

Opening its defense in court of the third version of the Trump Administration’s curbs on immigration, government lawyers on Thursday argued that a wide-ranging new study of the issue severs any link to prior anti-Muslim statements by the President or his aides. Thus, they argued in a new brief filed in a federal court in Maryland,… Read More

Declaring that it was taking no position on the legality of President Trump’s now-replaced order curbing entry into the U.S. of foreign nationals from six Mideast nations, the Supreme Court on Tuesday evening dismissed an Administration appeal on that question.   It did so, it said, because that order had expired on September 24, when a… Read More

Nine years after its last major ruling on the rights of detainees at the Guantanamo military prison, the Supreme Court refused on Monday to return to that abiding constitutional controversy.  Without comment, the Justices turned aside a significant challenge to the use of military commissions to try foreign nationals for crimes that could be prosecuted… Read More

Almost 17 months after the Supreme Court sent platoons of lawyers off on what turned out to be a failed mission to work out the nationwide controversy over women’s access to birth control, the newly deepened controversy returned to the federal courts on Friday. The first of a series of lawsuits landed in a federal… Read More

Fearing that an appeal to the Supreme Court could bring a nationwide ruling against gun control, officials of the local government in the nation’s capital have abandoned the defense of a strict law limiting the right to carry a concealed handgun outside the home. Their decision will thus keep out of the reach of the… Read More