Covering the Supreme Court, lower courts, and the law

With just three years to go before state legislatures begin to face a new task of redrafting election district maps after a new Census, the Supreme Court on Wednesday moved to further clarify when they may use the race of voters as a decisive factor. The new ruling, the latest in a series dealing with… Read More

A federal appeals court, apparently relying more on what White House officials have said than on what Justice Department lawyers had conveyed, refused on Monday those lawyers’ request for an indefinite delay of that court’s review of President Trump’s January 27 order strictly limiting immigration of people from Mideast nations. If, as expected, a new… Read More

The Trump Administration on Monday moved to abandon the effort, begun by the Obama administration and civil rights advocates more than three years ago, to prove that the nation’s strictest voter ID law is unconstitutional. The Texas law, though, will continue to face that challenge because the rights groups plan to continue it before a… Read More

The Supreme Court wants both sides in the significant case on transgender students’ rights to submit their views on the possible impact of the switch in policy on those rights by the Trump Administration.  The Court’s Clerk on Thursday afternoon asked for responses by letter, due by 2 p.m. next Wednesday. The Clerk, no doubt… Read More

Two federal agencies of the Trump Administration on Wednesday evening notified the Supreme Court and school officials across the nation that the federal government will no longer require that transgender students get access to bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identites.   A two-page policy statement thus formally overturned the approach followed for the… Read More

The Trump Administration plans to move shortly to abandon the federal government’s policy of defending equal rights for transgender students, but the switch may not prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the issue in its current term. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in his daily briefing for news reporters, said that “further guidance”… Read More

With President Trump and his aides now rewriting the controversial executive order to strictly limit immigration of foreign nationals from the Mideast, the administration’s lawyers chose on Thursday not to seek a federal court’s permission to enforce the first version, currently on hold. It is far from clear, however, that these new developments will end… Read More

Lawyers for two states challenging President Trump’s sweeping limits on immigration could soon get the chance to demand information from key government officials on how they put together that executive order, and what they intended it to do. That opportunity could result from a new order issued Monday afternoon by a federal trial judge in Seattle… Read More

President Trump’s attempt to strictly limit immigration of people from Mideast nations, stalled for now by court orders, moves into a new and important phase in the coming week.  The White House may produce an entirely new order, even as two federal courts will be pondering their next legal steps. The President, in comments Friday to reporters traveling… Read More

“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” “To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say ‘what the law is‘.” When the U.S. Constitution was still in… Read More