Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

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

The opposing sides in the historic controversy over President Trump’s limits on foreign travelers’ entry into the U.S. handed the Supreme Court on Thursday a difficult new question: will the defeats the Administration already suffered in this fight in lower courts remain, or be wiped off the books? That is a question the Justices probably… Read More

With the Supreme Court taking a new look on Tuesday at a constitutional puzzle it could not solve 13 years ago, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave a fairly strong hint that he may now have the answer. The puzzle has been easier to describe than to solve: when is partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional?  Or, in other… Read More

Two legal advocacy groups asked a federal judge on Friday to  allow them to begin a new challenge to President Trump’s latest attempt to restrict entry into the U.S. by foreign nationals.  The groups will seek a court order to block enforcement of the new  approach, which is scheduled to go into effect on October 18…. Read More