This post has also appeared on scotusblog.com After nine years of having only a limited role in the always heated controversy over abortion rights, the Supreme Court is moving back into the center, facing again a fundamental question that has not changed much since Roe v. Wade: will women and their doctors have the basic choice about ending a… Read More
Feb 16 2016
The Court and the impact of a vacancy
This post also appears on Constitution Daily. Under the Constitution, there can be only “one Supreme Court” – the actual language in Article III – and that is understood to mean that the Justices cannot call in temporary help. With the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the court very likely will finish its current term… Read More
Feb 14 2016
Commentary: Scalia in history — a first draft
This post also appears on scotusblog.com History will be kind to Justice Antonin Scalia — if the future fully appreciates his scholarship, his inventiveness in legal thinking, and his beguiling cleverness with words. It will not remember him well for his air of superiority, the sting of his rhetoric, his frequent disdain for collegiality, his… Read More
Jan 6 2016
A move to stop same-sex marriage in Alabama
The often-controversial chief justice of Alabama, Roy S. Moore, attempted on Wednesday to stop same-sex marriage licensing throughout the state — although a federal judge’s order directly contradicts his move, and the state Supreme Court has yet to sort out its own views on the issue. Moore issued a four-page “administrative order” in his capacity… Read More
Jan 4 2016
Hawaiians defend against contempt plea
A group of Hawaiians seeking to create a new tribal nation inside the state moved on Monday to head off a contempt order in the Supreme Court. They have done nothing to violate a Supreme Court order a month ago that blocked an election to select delegates to a convention to write a constitution, the group… Read More
Dec 14 2015
Smartphone design feud reaches the Court
After years of battling in lower courts between the nation’s No. 1 and No. 2 makers of smartphones, that billion-dollar-plus feud over patent rights reached the Supreme Court on Monday — maybe only the first of several potential appeals. This thoroughly modern case is actually an attempt to get the Court to take up an… Read More
Dec 1 2015
States get a bit more time for immigration reply
This post also appears on scotusblog.com The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted twenty-six states an extra eight days to file their response to the Obama administration’s appeal in defense of its broad new immigration policy. That extension — considerably less than the added thirty days the states had sought — makes it more likely that… Read More
Nov 24 2015
January’s argument schedule
The Supreme Court on Tuesday released the schedule of oral arguments for the sitting that begins on Monday, January 11. The first case to be heard is one of the most significant of the Term: a test of whether non-union members in public jobs should be freed from paying any dues or fees to the… Read More
Nov 23 2015
States seek delay of immigration case
This post also appears on scotusblog.com. Lawyers for the twenty-six states that challenged President Barack Obama’s broad policy to delay the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants asked the Supreme Court on Monday to give them more time to answer the government’s appeal. Delay has the potential to slow down a case that U.S. officials very much want decided… Read More
Nov 20 2015
Finally, a constitutional ruling on NSA phone taps
After more than nine years of the National Security Agency’s massive telephone tapping program, and a series of court challenges to it, the program finally got a federal appeals court judge’s constitutional blessing on Friday. U.S. Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh pronounced the data sweeps program to be “entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment.”
