In late June, I posted on the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, which included a very full-throated reaffirmation of the presumption against extraterritorality. I noted in my post that “[t]he Court’s opinion has implications for a petition that the Court considered at its private conference yesterday, British American Tobacco Co. […]
Archive | Supreme Court
SCOTUS to Release Oral Argument Audio
The AP reports that the Supreme Court will start releasing the audio of all oral arguments from the previous week each Friday beginning this term. This is a great decision. I know I’ll appreciate having these audio files for my morning commutes. It may also represent an adequate compromise between those support and oppose televising […]
Lithwick on Conservatives’ View of the Law
In a scathing review of the new NBC drama, Outlaw, about an ethically challenged, conservative Supreme Court justice who resigns from the bench to seek social justice, Dahlia Lithwick describes “the Supreme Court conservatives’ view of the legal system” as “the law is an airless, mechanistic set of fixed rules that privilege those who write the […]
Breyer’s Approach to the Constitution
Yesterday’s Washington Post has an interesting profile of Justice Stephen Breyer, keyed to the release of his new book, Making Our Democracy Work. “The court should reject approaches to interpreting the Constitution that consider the document’s scope and application as fixed at the moment of framing,” Breyer writes. “Rather, the court should regard the Constitution […]
Kagan’s Recusals
By Jonathan H. Adler on September 10, 2010 2:39 pm in Judicial Nominations, Kagan Nomination, Supreme Court
This week, Justice Elena Kagan “quietly recused herself” from ten more cases to be heard by the Supreme Court during the OT 2010 term, BLT reports. This means Justice Kagan has now recused in twenty-one cases, just over half of the forty cases accepted by the Court for the coming term. The high recusal rate […]
Justice Sotomayor at CWRU
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor came to Case Western Reserve University today for a Q&A session with students at the School of Law. The private event was well attended by 400-plus students, and Justice Sotomayor spent over an hour fielding their questions on a wide variety of legal subjects. I was fortunate enough to attend, though […]
The Polarization of Supreme Court Clerks
Adam Liptak reports on the apparent polarization of Supreme Court clerks. According to Liptak, Supreme Court justices increasingly hire only those who clerked for judges who share their ideological disposition. Justices appointed by Democratic presidents hire those who clerked for lower court judges appointed by Democratic presidents and justices appointed by Republican presidents hire those […]
Writ of Mandamus Sought in Comer v. Murphy Oil
It’s a big week for climate change litigation. In addition to the SG filing I noted below, the plaintiffs in Comer v. Murphy Oil, a public nuisance suit against multiple energy companies, have filed a petition for a writ of mandamus with the Supreme Court in an effort to revive their litigation. It’s an interesting […]
The SG’s Brief in American Electric Power v. Connecticut
The environmental law community is buzzing over a brief filed by the Solicitor General’s Office this week on behalf of the Tennessee Valley Authority in American Electric Power v. Connecticut. As reported by the Washington Post, the WSJ‘s Washington Wire, and Greenwire, environmentalist groups are shocked and dismayed by the SG’s decision to enter the […]
Court Under Roberts Is Most Restrained in Decades
Last Sunday, the NYT published a lengthy article by Adam Liptak, titled “Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decades,” arguing that the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Roberts, has become “the most conservative one in living memory.” I was in Yellowstone National Park at the time, and did not have the opportunity to comment. […]
Justice Brennan on Justice Marshall
Ed Whelan (National Review Online’s Bench Memos) quotes passages from an advance copy of Seth Stern & Stephen Wermiel’s forthcoming Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion (available for preorder on Amazon): Few understood just how much Marshall’s performance on the Court came to disappoint Brennan. It was a topic Brennan did not like to talk about with […]
Kagan Did “Just Enough” To Win Specter’s Vote
By Jonathan H. Adler on July 15, 2010 9:02 am in Judicial Nominations, Kagan Nomination, Supreme Court
Senator Arlen Specter (R D-PA) has an op-ed in USA Today explaining his decision to support the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. He explains that it was a close call, and that he was deeply troubled by her refusal to answer more substantive questions, but will support her nonetheless. As he summarizes: […]
Amicus Brief in Snyder v. Phelps
I’m pleased to say that we’ve just filed an amicus brief in Snyder v. Phelps that I wrote on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Profs. Ash Bhagwat, Marin Redish, Nadine Strossen, our own David Post, and me. As readers of the blog might gather, the brief argues that the Court […]
Sotomayor’s First Term
Roberts Barnes of the Washington Post reviews Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s first term on the Supreme Court. The unsurprising finding is that she has been a reliably liberal justice in ideologically divided cases and, contrary to some expectations, her experience as a prosecutor has not made her noticeably more sympathetic to the government in criminal law […]
The Washington Post on Citizens United
I report below on the data reported by this Washington Post article, but I also wanted to comment about the way the article frames the issue: Labor unions have dominated spending on independent campaign ads so far this election season, despite a recent Supreme Court decision that freed spending by corporations, a Washington Post analysis […]