I have a post at SCOTUSBlog recapping yesterday’s decision in Daimler Chrysler AG v. Bauman. It begins: Readers of the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Daimler Chrysler v. Bauman may have learned two things: First, it is increasingly difficult to establish general jurisdiction over a corporation for conduct unrelated to the forum; second, the Court […]
Archive | Supreme Court
Professors and Former SEC Commissioners’ Brief in Halliburton
As promised, here is the brief submitted by a second group of professors, together with former SEC Commissioners, in Halliburton Inc. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. It argues that the Court “need not wade into the complex and highly technical debate over the efficient markets hypothesis to answer the question presented here. Instead, the […]
Law Professors’ Brief in Halliburton
It’s been a busy enough week that I haven’t yet been able to post on the brief that colleagues and I filed on behalf of law professors Adam Pritchard and Todd Henderson in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., involving the continuing validity of Basic Inc. v. Levinson. Below is a short summary of the argument. Basic’s view […]
NYU Journal of Law and Liberty’s Supreme Court Review-Preview
The newest issue of the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty is available online. It contains their special Supreme Court Review-Preview, which in turn contains my short article, Interstate Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage after Windsor, which I’ve mentioned here before. It begins: Last June, the headlines said that the Supreme Court’s decision in United States […]
SCOTUS Stays Same-Sex Marriage in Utah
This morning the Supreme Court granted Utah’s application for a stay of the district court’s injunction requiring state officials to recognize same-sex marriage within the state. The stay application was initially submitted to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who referred it to the entire court. As Lyle Denniston observes, there is no indication that any member of […]
Which First Amendment Decision Would You Overturn?
In his Brown v. Allen concurrence, Justice Robert Jackson famously said of the Supreme Court “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” The Supreme Court inevitably makes mistakes and reaches the wrong result in some non-trivial number of cases. Accordingly, for the past two years I have […]
Justice Sotomayor Enjoins Enforcement of Contraception Mandate
Last night, before heading to Times Square for the New Year’s festivities, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a request for a stay of enforcement of the “contraception mandate” against several Catholic organizations. Here’s the order and more from SCOTUSBlog and the AP. In other pending cases, injunctions pending appeal were granted by split panels of the […]
The Sequester’s Impact on the Judiciary
In his 2013 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts comments on the negative effects of the sequester on the operation of the judicial branch. By its own initiative, the Judiciary had already achieved significant cost reductions when the sequester provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011 went into effect on […]
HuffPost Live on Cases to Watch in 2014
Around 12:50pm EST I’ll appear on HuffPost Live to discuss legal cases to watch in 2014, with a focus on the Supreme Court. Mike Sacks is the host and the other guests are Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network and Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall. I’ll post a link to the segment […]
Same-Sex Marriage Heads Back to Supreme Court
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit’s refusal to stay a district court decision invalidating Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage is sending the issue back to the Supreme Court less than six months after last summer’s the Windsor and Perry decisions. Adam Liptak reports: The question for the Supreme Court in the short term will be whether […]
Atlantic Marine and the Sachs Brief: A Post-Mortem
The Green Bag has picked, as an example of “exemplary legal writing,” Professor Stephen Sachs’s amicus brief in Atlantic Marine v. U.S. District Court (previously discussed here). This reminds me that I didn’t have a chance to write a post when the Supreme Court decided Atlantic Marine a few weeks ago. The decision was unanimous […]
Brown v. Buhman isn’t so complicated
By David Kopel on December 14, 2013 4:35 am in Criminal Law, Fourteenth Amendment, Gay Rights, Privacy, Religion and the Law, Religious Freedom, Sexual Conduct Restrictions, Sexual Orientation, Supreme Court, Television
To me, today’s decision of the United States District Court for the District of Utah in Brown v. Buhman is much clearer and carefully-reasoned that Orin finds it to be. There may be plenty of blogging on the case, and Eugene’s analysis next week, after he’s had a chance to analyze it, will provide the perspective […]
The Not-So-Hypothetical
Robert Barnes’ piece in the Washington Post today recounts a hypothetical from Justice Breyer at yesterday’s argument in Lozano v. Alvarez, involving the tolling of the statute of limitations under the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Following up on Justice Sotomayor’s hypothetical about the effect of a parent taking a child […]
Captioned Headings in a Supreme Court Opinion [UPDATED]
Justice Scalia’s opinion today in United States v. Woods is a minor loss for the taxpayer bar, overturning a longstanding Fifth Circuit doctrine that made it harder for the government to impose exorbitant penalties when it successfully invalidated a transaction as a tax shelter. [Full disclosure: In private practice, I worked on Bemont v. United […]
New Paper: “Kiobel Surprise: Unexpected by Scholars But Consistent with International Trends”
By Eugene Kontorovich on November 12, 2013 2:54 pm in Alien Tort Statute, Federal Jurisdiction, International Law, Law Reviews, Legal Scholarship, Supreme Court
My article on Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum is up on SSRN. It is forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review‘s Federal Courts Issue. Here is the abstract; comments on the article are welcome: The unanimous ruling in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum blind-sided the legal academy. The case involved one of the most contentious […]