Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

Two major new appeals to the Supreme Court, raising fundamental issues about the government’s power to use Guantanamo military courts to try war crimes, have been bogged down for weeks in difficulties over getting security clearance for documents in one of the cases. Last week, all of this got sorted out, and the two cases… Read More

At the suggestion of a federal judwednesday ge, lawyers on both sides of the main court battle over President Trump’s order to cut off federal funds for “sanctuary cities” are working together on a way to keep that approach on hold for at least a month.  Discussions on how to phrase such an agreement were… Read More

A divided Supreme Court ruled on Monday, more clearly than it had done before, that city government may sue home loan companies for racial discrimination against minority buyers. However, it put a new and strict limit on that right, saying that a city must offer direct proof that the local government itself had actually been… Read More

President Trump’s lawyers have told a federal judge that, at least temporarily, they will not seek permission to enforce a presidential order that threatens to cut off federal funds for so-called “sanctuary cities” – local governments that won’t help round up undocumented immigrants. But the president’s policy faces an even broader threat that will be… Read More

In all of the court cases that led up to the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage two years ago, only one was a real trial, with dramatic testimony by witnesses on the stand.  That was the famous “Proposition 8” trial in California in 2010, testing the constitutionality of a state ban on… Read More

UPDATED Thursday 11:12 p.m., Arkansas time.  Kenneth Dewayne Williams was put to death by lethal injection in a 13-minute procedure with less than an hour remaining before his death warrant would run out. ———————— For the fourth time in the past eight days, the Supreme Court on Thursday night refused to delay an execution in… Read More

Declaring that President Trump probably acted unconstitutionally in attempting to cut off federal funds to city and county governments that do not help enforce federal immigration law, a judge in San Francisco on Tuesday temporarily blocked enforcement of the policy anywhere in the nation. In the latest action by a federal court against the Trump Administration’s… Read More

The federal appeals court reviewing President Trump’s revised immigration order in a case from Hawau refused on Friday to send the dispute at the outset to a full court — either one of 11 judges or one of 24.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the state’s plea for en banc review… Read More

FURTHER UPDATE Friday 12:34 a.m.   The Supreme Court, without comment and with no noted dissents, denied all five of the new requests, thus allowing Ledell Lee’s execution to go ahead.  (After that, his execution, a 12-minute procedure carried out without apparent incident, was completed four minutes before the death warrant expired.)  It was not… Read More

The Supreme Court on Wednesday sent a very strong hint that it is eager, maybe even passionately so, to decide one of history’s most important cases on dealings between religion and government.  And, almost as unmistakable was a signal that most of the Justices have a keen interest in giving churches more access to public… Read More