Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

On Saturday, eight days from now, Gavin Grimm will join other seniors at a Virginia high school, on the edge of the town of Gloucester Courthouse, for their graduation ceremony.  On Friday, lawyers for him and for the local school board filed new legal briefs in a federal courthouse in Richmond, continuing their running dispute… Read More

Moving energetically to defend President Trump’s new limits on immigration of Mideastern people and refugees, Administration lawyers asked the Supreme Court late Thursday night to allow prompt enforcement of all parts of the executive order. It sought postponement of two federal trial judge’s temporary orders blocking enforcement nationwide of key sections of the presidential order,… Read More

The Trump Administration legal team signaled on Wednesday that it will soon pursue an appeal to the Supreme Court to defend the presidential order limiting immigration of foreign nationals  from six Mideast nations. The plan was disclosed as Administration lawyers asked a federal trial judge in Detroit to put on hold a lawsuit there about… Read More

A federal appeals court, in a breakthrough ruling on transgender rights, has ruled that the Constitution’s ban on unequal treatment of the sexes provides significant  protection against discrimination based on gender identity. If a program or policy by a public agency, like a school, denies equality based on a stereotyped image of how a transgender… Read More

The Supreme Court, taking on another significant controversy over voting rights, agreed on Tuesday to clarify the power of states to take voters off the registration rolls if they skip going to the polls in several elections.  The new case from Ohio will come up for review in the court’s term starting next fall. At… Read More

For years, lawyers working on election cases have hoped that, one day, they could persuade the Supreme Court to finally decide if partisanship can go too far in drawing up new election districts.   On Friday, one of those attempts appeared to have run into doubts that the Justices have power to decide it. The case… Read More

Trump Administration lawyers, in a court filing made public Friday, argued that no federal court can order the president to turn over documents for use in a lawsuit, even if the demand involves papers created during the election campaign for the presidency.   That claim was made as those attorneys continued to try to fend off… Read More

The Supreme Court will have to move with unusual speed if it is to promptly settle the constitutional dispute over President Trump’s temporary ban on entry into the U.S. of foreign nationals of six Mideast nations with Muslim majorities.   The Justices at this point are only about five weeks from the planned end of their… Read More

In a ruling that is going to be tested, and soon, in the Supreme Court, a federal appeals court in Richmond, VA, on Thursday barred the Trump Administration from enforcing the President’s revised curb on immigration of foreign nationals from six Muslim-majority nations. That order, the majority said, “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination,”… Read More

Gavin Grimm, the Virginia youth who has been praised by federal judges for his maturity in pursuing his legal claims as a transgender boy, has now officially become the master of his case.  He reached age 18 earlier this month, so two federal courts have now changed his ongoing case title.  Now it is Gavin Grimm… Read More