Supreme Court

خلاصہ: Supreme Court sends dispute on HIV disability claim back to the lower court and rejects case on defining “reasonable doubt”The Supreme Court on Monday sent the case of a Louisiana man who was prevented from using a physical therapy clinic’s pool because he has HIV back to the state courts for them to take another look at the man’s claim that the clinic violated federal disability laws. The brief, unsigned opinion in Doe v. Dynamic Physical Therapy was part of a list of orders released from the justices’ private conference on Friday, Dec. 5. The justices did not add any new cases to their argument docket for the 2025-26 term. On Friday, they announced that they would weigh in on the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship, as well as three other cases. In the case of John Doe, the Louisiana courts dismissed his federal disability claims under state law. Specifically, they relied on a Louisiana law that gives health-care providers immunity from lawsuits during public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. On Monday, the Supreme Court reversed that ruling. “Defining the scope of liability under state law is the State’s prerogative,” the two-paragraph opinion acknowledged. “But a State has no power to confer immunity from federal causes of action,” the court wrote. And even if Doe’s claims ultimately cannot go forward for other reasons, the court concluded, “that is for the Louisiana courts to decide in the first instance” based on federal law. Additionally, the justices denied review in the case of Antonio Nathaniel Davenport, who was convicted of (among other things) federal murder charges. At his trial, Davenport asked the judge to instruct the jury on the definition of “reasonable doubt,” but the judge declined to do so, citing federal rules that – according to the judge – barred him from “defining reasonable doubt over and above what’s included in the instructions already.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with the decision to turn down Davenport’s appeal. She noted that she had done so because Davenport had filed his petition for review too late and his lawyer “gave no explanation for delay,” but contended that the trial judge “was mistaken” in rejecting Davenport’s request for a jury instruction on reasonable doubt. According to Sotomayor, “ederal courts are not prohibited from defining reasonable doubt for the jury.” “In view of the central importance of the reasonable-doubt standard to criminal procedure,” she said, “balanced against the potential for confusion from a reasonable-doubt instruction, district courts should weigh the circumstances of each individual case to decide whether to provide a definition to the jury.” The Supreme Court also sought the Trump administration’s views on three petitions for review: Does 1-2 v. Hochul , the case of a group of New York health-care workers who were fired from their jobs after they refused to be vaccinated because of religious objections to the vaccines; Hoffmann v. WBI Energy Transmission , involving the determination of compensation in private condemnations under the Natural Gas Act; and Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University of Georgia , in which the court has been asked to decide whether Title IX, a federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that receive federal funding, gives employees of those institutions a right to sue for sex discrimination in employment. There is no deadline for the U.S. solicitor general to file his briefs in these cases. The court will meet for its final scheduled private conference of 2025 on Friday, Dec. 12. Orders from that conference could come as soon as Friday afternoon. The post Supreme Court sends dispute on HIV disability claim back to the lower court and rejects case on defining “reasonable doubt” appeared first on SCOTUSblog .Source InformationPublisher: ScotusBlogOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: When rules of statutory interpretation change midstreamClear Statements is a recurring series by Abbe R. Gluck on civil litigation and the modern regulatory and statutory state. Depending on who you ask, the real “bad old days” at the Supreme Court were the late 1970s. At least that’s the impression one comes away with after reading the briefs in FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, Lt d ., to be argued tomorrow, Wednesday, Dec. 10. The question presented is whether the Investment Company Act of 1940 includes an implied right of action – specifically, an individual right to go to court to rescind a contract that one contends violates this investor-protection statute. But a deeper question implicated by the case is how the court handles statutory interpretation in an era of methodological change. We were once purposivists , we are now textualists. Yada yada yada. It’s widely accepted that the court has shifted over the past decades from a more eclectic approach to questions of statutory interpretation – which often took into account congressional intent, purpose, and history alongside text – to a modern approach that is increasingly separated from congressional evidence and tethered to text, linguistic rules, and associated presumptions. This shift is core to the current array of disputes about which federal statutes allow individuals to sue to enforce their guarantees. The question in FS Credit is similar to the question in Medina v. Planned Parenthood , decided at the end of last term. There, the question was whether Medicaid, enacted in 1965, creates a right for beneficiaries to sue to enforce Medicaid’s provision allowing them to select any qualified healthcare provider. The court held that it did not, because Medicaid does not contain what the court says it is now looking for: namely, “unmistakably” clear evidence in the text creating the individually enforceable rights. Along the way, the court criticized “a time in the mid-20th century when ‘the Court assumed it to be a proper judicial function to provide’ whatever ‘remedies it deemed necessary to make effective a statute’s purpose,’” and reflected on the past thusly: “Admittedly, this Court briefly experimented with a different approach, and that fact has given rise to some confusion in the lower courts. For a time … the Court sometimes took an expansive view of its power to imply private causes of action to enforce federal laws.” In other words, the court’s earlier test to find an implied private right of action did not require magic language. Instead the court would look to whether the statute was enacted for the benefit of individuals like the plaintiffs, seek evidence of legislative intent to create the private remedy, and confirm that doing so would be consistent with the statute’s purpose. Anyone following the court today, of course, knows that this court really does like magic words, across a wide array of contexts. Whether it’s looking for evidence that Congress meant to delegate a “ major question ” to an agency or in cases like FS Credit, the modern court tends to impose a clarity tax on Congress (one that, not incidentally, raises the cost and difficulty of legislating in the first place). But the “experiment” with that earlier approach to implied rights was by no means “brief,” as the court suggested in Medina . The court’s eclectic and purposive approach goes back to the tradition of Blackstone, appearing in famous chestnuts from Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (decided in 1892 and relying on statutory purpose to interpret the scope of an immigration ban as it applied to a church pastor) to NLRB v. Hearst Publications (decided in 1944 and consisting of a purposive inquiry into the meaning of “employee” under the National Labor Relations Act) to United Steelworkers v. Weber (decided in 1979 and where both the majority and dissent relied on purpose and legislative history to determine application of the Civil Rights Act to affirmative action), and scores more. Those principles were at the core of Harvard’s renowned Legal Process school of interpretation in the 1950s and 1960s, which emphasized that courts should presume, while interpreting, that legislators were “reasonable persons pursuing reasonable purposes reasonably.” They guided much of the court’s work from the New Deal to the rise of Justice Antonin Scalia’s textualism in the 1990s. This is not to say those approaches were without their weaknesses. It is simply to say that purposivism was not a minor frolic and detour in the history of statutory interpretation. Nevertheless, as the respondents’ brief in FS Credit colorfully notes , “Petitioners (and the United States) spend much of their brief … railing against the bad old days when this Court routinely inferred private damages actions.” Methodological change can raise tricky questions. Scalia used to say that the most legitimate statutory interpretation rules either reflect how Congress drafts a statute or are background rules Congress knows and drafts against. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo , the case that overruled the 40-year-old approach to administrative deference announced in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council , made a similar claim, namely that the only legitimate statutory interpretation rules are the ones that reflect the “reality” of Congress’ expectations when drafting laws. But what happens when Congress drafts statutes in the shadow of one statutory interpretation regime (such as one focused on purpose and congressional intent) but the statutes live into, and are litigated under, a different one down the line? It’s hard to argue that the Congress of 1965 that enacted Medicaid could have predicted today’s textualist revolution and so written in a private right of action when “unmistakably” clear language wasn’t previously required or was even a common phrase in the lawyer’s lexicon. Could Congress go through the entire U.S. Code and update every single potential provision where a private right of action could be warranted? Of course it could , in theory. But, in fact, that’s an impossibly tall order for political...

خلاصہ: Originalism’s campaign finance conundrumPlease note that SCOTUS Outside Opinions constitute the views of outside contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff. In a recent interview , Justice Amy Coney Barrett shared her view that “originalism became prominent as a theory” as a counterweight to the theory of “living constitutionalism” that “had become dominant” during the courts led by Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger. According to Barrett, whereas the living constitutionalism of the Warren-Burger eras put the court in the position of functionally amending the Constitution by updating its meaning, originalism instead aims to understand “how those who ratified the Constitution understood the words.” There is no doubt that decisions from the Warren and Burger courts are now open to question by a solid majority of originalist justices; the court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , holding that there is no constitutional right to an abortion, is only the most noteworthy example of this . But many other precedents from that same era have not yet received comparable scrutiny, prominent among these being the court’s seminal campaign finance decision in the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo . When the Supreme Court hears oral argument in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission this morning, Tuesday, Dec. 9, it will confront fundamental questions about the First Amendment and money in politics. But the case also presents an underappreciated puzzle: How should originalists think about Buckley , which created much of our constitutional framework around campaign finance? What Buckley did In the early 1970s, Congress crafted legislation aimed at addressing the soaring cost of political campaigns and reducing the perceived influence of wealthy interests. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 passed with bipartisan supermajorities in both chambers. President Richard Nixon signed it into law, noting that “the goal of controlling campaign expenditures was a highly laudable one.” When Congress amended FECA in 1974, which, among other things, further limited the amounts that could be contributed to federal candidates, President Gerald Ford proclaimed : “The unpleasant truth is that big money influence has come to play an unseem role in our electoral process. This bill will hep to right that wrong.” Nevertheless, in Buckley – which turns 50 next month – the Supreme Court struck down most of FECA’s core provisions. The court functionally equated spending money in politics with “the freedom of speech” itself, concluding that limits on campaign spending “necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.” While the court upheld limits on direct contributions to federal candidates as a guard against quid pro quo corruption, it invalidated all limits on expenditures by campaigns or independent groups. Buckley runs to a remarkable 144 pages in the U.S. Reports — the longest majority opinion the court has ever produced. Yet nowhere in those 144 pages does the court engage in any sort of originalist analysis of the core questions in the case. There’s no sustained examination of what “the freedom of speech” originally entailed, no investigation of how the founding generation would have understood campaign finance regulation, and no inquiry into which institution they expected to resolve such questions. A methodological resemblance Indeed, Buckley emerged during a period when originalism was not the court’s dominant mode of constitutional interpretation, and the decision bears striking similarities to other cases that originalists have criticized for lacking grounding in the Constitution’s original meaning. Three examples are especially pertinent. First, in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut , Justice William O. Douglas famously identified a constitutional right to privacy prohibiting states from banning contraception for married couples. He derived this from “penumbras, formed by emanations” of various Bill of Rights provisions, a move which originalists have condemned for creating rights without any clear textual foundation. Buckley took similar leaps, deriving the concept of unlimited campaign spending from the First Amendment’s “freedom of speech” without any consideration of this amendment’s original meaning. Second is Miranda v. Arizona , decided in 1966, which prescribed specific warnings that police officers must give to individuals in custody. In that case, the court provided no textualist or originalist grounding in the Fifth Amendment’s self-incrimination clause. For that reason, originalists have long derided the decision as “inconsistent with the original understanding of the right against self-incrimination” and “a usurpation of legislative and administrative powers, thinly disguised as an exercise in constitutional exegesis” Buckley likewise creates detailed rules constraining democratic choices about campaign finance without any obvious textual commands. Last is 1973’s Roe v. Wade , which created an elaborate trimester framework that, according to originalists, resembled legislation far more than constitutional interpretation. Like Roe , Buckley constructed a detailed architecture — distinguishing contributions from expenditures, applying different levels of scrutiny to each, and creating categorical rules about corruption — that looks far more legislative than interpretive. None of this necessarily means that Buckley – or any of the cases cited above – reached the wrong result as a matter of policy. But it does raise questions about methodology. If these forms of reasoning were problematic to originalists in Griswold , Roe , and Miranda , what makes them acceptable in Buckley ? The “who decides” question Recent originalist scholarship reveals an even deeper problem with Buckley , however. Stanford law professor Jud Campbell’s path-breaking research on the founding era has shown that recovering original meaning requires an understanding of not just what rights the Founders recognized, but which institution they expected to resolve disputes about those rights. Based on this understanding, and as relevant to Buckley , a key question isn’t merely whether political speech was valued at the founding (it certainly was) – but whether courts were expected to micromanage legislative efforts to address corruption or preserve electoral integrity. And Campbell’s research demonstrates that there was no such view. Instead, the Founders believed that representative institutions could...

خلاصہ: SCOTUStoday for Tuesday, December 9Today marks 25 years since the Supreme Court halted the recount in Florida to hear arguments in the dispute between then-candidate George W. Bush and his opponent in the 2000 presidential election, then-Vice President Al Gore, over the process for the recount. The court heard arguments two days later and released its unsigned opinion in favor of Bush one day after that. SCOTUS Quick Hits On Monday, the court released an order list announcing several denied petitions, as well as a summary reversal in Doe v. Dynamic Physical Therapy, LLC , a case on whether a state procedural law immunizing health care providers from liability during a public health emergency overrides a federal cause of action. Also on Monday, the justices heard argument in Trump v. Slaughter , on the president’s authority to fire the heads of independent, multi-member federal agencies. For key takeaways, check out Amy Howe’s argument analysis , the SCOTUSblog live blog , and Advisory Opinions’ live broadcast . Today, the justices will hear argument in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission , on whether to further cut back campaign finance limitations. Amy’s case preview is available here . Tomorrow, the justices will hear argument in Hamm v. Smith , on how and whether courts should consider the cumulative effect of multiple IQ scores when applying the court’s ban on executing people who are intellectually disabled, and FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, Ltd. , on whether the federal courts should recognize a federal statute as implying a private right of action (that is, providing the ability for private parties to sue) when the words of the statute do not explicitly authorize it. The court could issue its decision in the interim docket case on President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy the National Guard to Illinois at any time. Morning Reads US Supreme Court turns away appeal of Texas library book ban (Jan Wolfe, Reuters) — Among the many petitions denied by the Supreme Court on Monday was “an appeal by a group of residents of a rural Texas county of a judicial decision allowing local officials to remove 17 books that these officials deemed objectionable from public libraries,” according to Reuters . “The justices let stand a lower court’s decision allowing the removal of books including ones dealing with themes of race and LGBT identity, from its public library system. The lower court rejected the argument made by the plaintiffs that removing the books was unlawful under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections against government abridgment of free speech.” Supreme Court rejects free speech case over controversial vanity plate (Maureen Groppe, USA Today) — Monday’s order list also revealed that the court won’t “get involved in states’ regulation of vanity license plates,” according to USA Today . The justices turned down “an appeal from a Tennessee woman challenging the rejection of her controversial ’69PWNDU’ personalized plate,” who had asked the court to take up her case and “find that she is expressing her own views through a vanity plate, not the government’s, a decision that would have limited states’ ability to control that message.” What a Supreme Court decision about a Texas map means for redistricting in Indiana (Marissa Meador, Indianapolis Star)(Paywall) — The Supreme Court’s Dec. 4 decision to allow Texas to use its new congressional map in the 2026 elections “could hamper a potential legal challenge to Indiana’s mid-decade redistricting efforts,” according to the Indianapolis Star . Like Texas’ map, Indiana’s proposed map has faced pushback for potentially diluting the voting power of nonwhite voters, but Indiana Republicans, like Texas Republicans before them, insist that it serves political, rather than racial, goals. “As the United States Supreme Court emphasized once again last night, redistricting for political reasons is constitutional,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a press release on Dec. 5. After Deadlocked Supreme Court Case, More States Jump on Religious Charter School Bandwagon (Linda Jacobson, The 74) — The court soon may be asked to reconsider “whether charter schools can be religious,” as efforts are underway in Tennessee and Oklahoma to get such schools approved by education officials, according to The 74 . “In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. … The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school.” In May, the Supreme Court split 4-4 over a different religious charter school in Oklahoma, leaving a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court rejecting the Catholic school in place. The deadlock was possible because Justice Amy Coney Barrett had recused herself. Must the Military Disobey Unlawful Orders? Pam Bondi Has Said Yes (Adam Liptak, The New York Times)(Paywall) — Before Pam Bondi was the U.S. attorney general, she was a lawyer for the America First Policy Institute. As part of her work for that conservative think tank, she filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court last year in the presidential immunity case and noted that such immunity is not as big of a problem as it may seem in the military context because members of the military must refuse unlawful orders, according to The New York Times . That brief became more significant recently when President Donald Trump criticized Democratic lawmakers who “issued a video … telling members of the military that they must refuse unlawful orders” and as his administration faces pushback over “strikes on boats said to be smuggling drugs.” A Closer Look: Coverage of the Slaughter Argument Yesterday’s argument in Trump v. Slaughter was covered by a great deal of outlets (including SCOTUSblog ), which were watching to see whether the court seemed likely to grant President Donald Trump more control over independent, multi-member federal agencies. Here’s a sampling of the headlines used for articles summarizing the discussion,...

خلاصہ: Court seems likely to side with Trump on president’s power to fire FTC commissionerThe Supreme Court on Monday morning signaled that it was likely to strike down a federal law that restricts the president’s ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission. During nearly two and a half hours of arguments in the case of Trump v. Slaughter , a solid majority of the justices appeared to agree with the Trump administration that a law prohibiting the president from firing FTC commissioners except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” violates the constitutional separation of powers between the three branches of government. And although several justices expressed skepticism about a 90-year-old case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States , upholding that law, it was less clear that there was a majority ready to overrule it. A decision in favor of the Trump administration would significantly increase the president’s power over not only the FTC but roughly two dozen other multi-member agencies that Congress intended to be independent. President Donald Trump has also fired members of the National Labor Relations Board , the Merit Systems Protection Board , and the Consumer Product Safety Commission . The Supreme Court has already allowed those firings to take effect in proceedings on its interim docket, but the court’s ruling in the case of FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter will provide a more definitive ruling on the legality of those firings. The FTC has five commissioners, who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve seven-year terms. Under the laws governing the FTC, no more than three of the commissioners can come from a single political party, and, as noted above, commissioners can only be removed from office for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” During his first term in office, Trump nominated Slaughter to fill one of the Democratic seats on the FTC. Then-President Joe Biden in 2023 tapped Slaughter to serve a second term, which was slated to end in 2029. In March, Trump sent Slaughter an email firing her. He did not cite any reason for her removal other than that allowing her to remain on the FTC would be “inconsistent with Administration’s priorities.” Slaughter went to federal court in Washington, D.C., to challenge the legality of her firing. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate her, and a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the government’s bid to pause that ruling while it appealed. Judges Patricia Millett and Nina Pillard relied on the Supreme Court’s 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States , in which the justices upheld the FTC’s removal statute against a challenge by the Roosevelt administration. Only the Supreme Court, they wrote, could overturn that case. The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court in September, asking the justices to put the lower court’s order on hold while it appeals. A few weeks later, the court granted that request, effectively giving Trump the green light to fire Slaughter, and agreed to hear arguments in the dispute. Representing the Trump administration, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court on Monday that Humphrey’s Executor was an “indefensible outlier” and a “decaying husk” that must be overruled. The Supreme Court’s cases in recent years, he said, have “repudiated its foundations.” By contrast, Amit Agarwal, representing Rebecca Slaughter, stated that the “duty to execute the law does not give” the president “the power to violate the law with impunity.” If the Trump administration is correct that the removal statute at the center of the case violates the separation of powers, then “all three branches of government have been wrong from the start” of our country’s history, he contended. Much of the argument focused on the possible broader effects of a ruling for either the Trump administration or Slaughter. The justices questioned whether a decision in Slaughter’s favor could give Congress sweeping power, including the authority to convert existing Cabinet departments into multi-member agencies that would be insulated from presidential control. Agarwal agreed with Chief Justice John Roberts when Roberts asked whether Congress “could just take over” some Cabinet departments. He told Roberts that such a result is “probably within the realm of possibility,” although he emphasized that it would be “a pretty small universe” because so many Cabinet departments wield at least some executive power. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, among others, was worried about such a scenario, telling Agarwal that it would allow Congress to create independent agencies without any requirement of partisan balance and with lengthy terms for the agency heads. This would give Congress the ability to create agencies to “thwart future presidents,” Kavanaugh remarked. On the other side, some justices expressed concern that a ruling in favor of the Trump administration could affect not only other multi-member agencies like the MSPB and the NLRB but also other entities with similar removal statutes, such as the United States Tax Court and the United States Court of Claims. Agarwal told the justices that if Trump prevails, “everything would be on the chopping block.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor echoed this sentiment, telling Sauer that he was “putting” those institutions “at risk.” Justice Elena Kagan agreed, remarking to Sauer that if the justices were to adopt his theory, “it seems to include a great many things.” Justice Samuel Alito was more sympathetic. He asked Sauer whether the court could issue a narrower ruling for the Trump administration that did not address the constitutionality of removal provisions for institutions such as the Tax Court. Sauer responded that it could. The Supreme Court has discouraged, he emphasized, “general pronouncements” on issues that were not before the justices. Although there seemed to be a clear majority that was ready to rule that Trump has the power to fire FTC commissioners, it was less certain whether the justices were ready to take the additional step of overruling Humphrey’s Executor . The Democratic...

خلاصہ: Advisory Opinions live broadcast: Presidential Firing PowerOral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter , on the president’s authority to fire the heads of independent, multi-member federal agencies, have concluded, but the conversation isn’t over. Listen now to a special live broadcast of the Advisory Opinions podcast to reflect on what the justices said and what could happen next. Advisory Opinions host Sarah Isgur is joined by SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe, David French, and Adam White. The post Advisory Opinions live broadcast: Presidential Firing Power appeared first on SCOTUSblog .Source InformationPublisher: ScotusBlogOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: SCOTUStoday for Monday, December 8Happy Monday! Get your week started the right way by joining our live blog during today’s oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter . Our conversation will kick off at 9:30 a.m. EST. SCOTUS Quick Hits On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear oral arguments on President Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. It also took up three other cases , including on jurisdictional issues concerning arbitration and where one can be tried for an offense. For more on these cases, see the On Site section below. On Friday, the Trump administration asked the court to pause a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that would send a dispute over a policy governing speaking engagements by immigration judges back to a federal trial court for fact-finding. The court could issue its decision in the interim docket case on President Donald Trump’s effort to deploy the National Guard to Illinois at any time. The court will release an order list this morning at 9:30 a.m. EST and announce decisions made at the justices’ private conference on Friday. Today, the justices will hear argument in Trump v. Slaughter , on the president’s authority to fire the heads of independent, multi-member federal agencies. As noted above, our live blog will begin at 9:30 a.m. EST. Once the argument ends, look for a live recording of the Advisory Opinions podcast on the SCOTUSblog homepage . Tomorrow, the justices will hear argument in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission , on whether to further cut back campaign finance limitations. Morning Reads Roberts and Kagan prepare for another showdown on executive power (Joan Biskupic, CNN) — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan are expected to be on opposite sides in Trump v. Slaughter , as they have been in several cases on presidential power over the years, according to CNN . “Since his days as a young lawyer in the Ronald Reagan administration, Roberts has argued for vast executive power, including the authority to fire individuals who lead administrative agencies. … Kagan, in contrast, believes the constitutional separation of powers allows Congress to establish and safeguard certain areas of administrative independence.” After Supreme Court win, GOP rushes to draw more House maps (Patrick Marley, The Washington Post)(Paywall) — On Thursday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Texas to use its new congressional map in the 2026 elections, “and Republicans across the country took the decision as a sign they could redraw more lines as they seek to retain a fragile majority in the U.S. House next year,” according to The Washington Post . “The next battleground is Indiana,” where the state House approved a new map on Friday, and Florida leaders have also expressed interest in redistricting, although “Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has said the state should wait” until the Supreme Court addresses the future of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais . Democrats divided on redistricting in wake of Supreme Court’s Texas ruling (Caroline Vakil, The Hill) — As Republicans push forward with redistricting plans after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Texas’ map, Democrats continue to debate whether to pursue similar efforts in blue states, according to The Hill . “While Virginia Democrats are signaling they’ll move forward with redrawing their congressional lines, Democrats in other states have expressed opposition, posing a challenge for those in the party who want to net as many additional seats as possible before the midterms.” Why Costco, other businesses are suing the Trump admin over tariffs (Rachel Barber, USA Today) — Businesses, like Costco, that have filed lawsuits seeking tariff refunds if the Supreme Court strikes down a large share of Trump’s signature tariffs are taking the risk of upsetting customers who support the president and complicating their relationship with the administration. “There’s so much uncertainty right now that the calculation becomes: Is filing a suit worth the incremental certainty that if this action is taken, we are in a better position?” said Drew DeLong, head of corporate statecraft at Kearney Foresight , to USA Today . Actually, the Supreme Court Has a Plan (Sarah Isgur, The New York Times)(Paywall) — In a column for The New York Times, Advisory Opinions host and SCOTUSblog editor Sarah Isgur contended that, in Trump v. Slaughter , the court can work to “rebalance the separation of powers in the federal government” if it makes it clear that the president should have control over agencies housed within the executive branch while also reining in “Congress’s bad habit of delegating vast and vague powers to the executive branch.” “The Constitution vests ‘all legislative powers’ in Congress and ‘the executive power’ in the president,” she wrote. “The court is overdue to police those lines and keep the branches separated.” A Closer Look: Humphrey’s Executor v. United States A 90-year-old Supreme Court decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States , is in the spotlight as the justices hear argument in Trump v. Slaughter this morning. Slaughter is specifically about the president’s authority to remove a member of the Federal Trade Commission without cause and more broadly about whether Congress can place limits on the president’s authority to fire the heads of independent, multi-member federal agencies. In considering this case, the court is faced with whether to overrule Humphrey’s Executor and thereby increase the power of the executive branch. Humphrey’s Executor arose out of a dispute between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and William Humphrey, an FTC commissioner who had been appointed by Roosevelt’s predecessor, President Herbert Hoover, to a seven-year term in 1931. After Roosevelt took office in 1933, he twice asked Humphrey to resign. Humphrey refused, and so, a few months later, Roosevelt removed him from office. Humphrey died just over four months after that as he was fighting his removal, and the executor of his estate kept the battle going by asking the Court of Claims for “Humphrey’s salary from the date of his removal...

خلاصہ: A delayed National Guard deployment, a reinstated federal official, and other issues on the interim docketOver the past two weeks, the Supreme Court resolved two of the longest-standing matters on its interim docket with orders clearing the way for the Trump administration to implement new rules for sex markers on passports and denying a request to allow a young girl set to be sent to family members in Venezuela to remain in Texas with her mother. And on Friday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied a stay in a case on whether the Republic of the Philippines or a class of individuals who suffered (or whose families suffered) at the hands of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos should have control of $40 million from his estate that’s in a New York bank account, writing that a stay is not needed in order to maintain the status quo while the dispute continues.   The oldest pending request from the Trump administration – filed on Sept. 19 – concerns its effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. But this won’t be addressed until January at the earliest, when the court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case.  So what does that leave on the justices’ short-term to-do list? There are three notable applications that the court feasibly could answer by the end of the month, perhaps most prominently a dispute over President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Illinois. National Guard deployment When the Trump administration asked the court on Oct. 17 to pause an order from a federal judge in Illinois preventing the National Guard deployment, it appeared that the justices would issue their decision in a matter of days. Justice Amy Coney Barrett instructed lawyers for Illinois and Chicago to respond to the administration’s request by 5 p.m. on Oct. 20, putting the case on a much more condensed timeline than most interim docket matters.  More than a week went by, however, before the court addressed the briefs. And its response on Oct. 29 wasn’t a decision; it was a request for new briefs on the law that Trump invoked when ordering the deployment. Specifically, the court asked whether the law, which allows a president to call the National Guard into federal service when they are unable to “execute the laws of the United States” with “regular forces,” is referring to the regular forces of the U.S. military.  Both sides filed their new briefs on Nov. 10. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer contended that “regular forces” refers to civilian law-enforcement officers and that courts should give “extraordinary deference” to Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to protect federal officials in Chicago rather than the standing military. For their part, lawyers for Illinois and Chicago argued that “regular forces” “refers to the full-time, professional military” and that, therefore, Trump had not satisfied the conditions laid out in the law before federalizing and deploying the National Guard.  On Monday, Sauer and the lawyers for Illinois and Chicago filed what are thought to be their final briefs in the case, responding to arguments made in the Nov. 10 briefs. The Supreme Court can now act at any time.  Register of Copyrights The Trump administration is also waiting for the justices to act on its request for the court to pause a ruling by a federal appeals court that reinstated Shira Perlmutter to her position as head of the U.S. Copyright Office. The administration fired her on May 10, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit blocked Perlmutter’s removal (at least temporarily) on Sept. 10.  This dispute, like the Cook case or the case on Trump’s effort to fire a Democratic appointee to the Federal Trade Commission, raises the question of who has the authority to remove various federal officials. Perlmutter was fired after her former boss, Carla Hayden, then the Librarian of Congress, was fired by the president and replaced by Todd Blanche, the Deputy U.S. Attorney General, whom Trump appointed as the Acting Librarian of Congress. Perlmutter was then fired two days later. Perlmutter contends that the president did not have the power to fire Hayden because the Library of Congress is part of the legislative branch, and that, therefore, he did not have the authority to fire her.  The Trump administration, on the other hand, told the court that the Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights (Perlmutter’s title) “are part of the Executive Branch” and that the register “wields executive power” through her work on copyright registration and copyright law and her participation in “negotiations with foreign governments concerning copyright issues.” The D.C. Circuit’s order, therefore, represented “improper judicial interference with the President’s power to remove executive officers,” Sauer wrote.  Blanche v. Perlmutter has been fully briefed since Nov. 12. Climate-related reports in California The newest application, in Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Sanchez, centers on two California laws requiring covered businesses to file reports with the state on climate-related issues, including financial risks to their global operations created by weather changes and emissions generated by those operations. The chamber and other business groups urged the court to pause enforcement of the laws, contending that they violate free speech by “compel businesses to speak on climate change—even if they have said nothing about climate, emissions, or sustainability in the past.” And the violation can’t be justified by the government’s plan for the information, the chamber added, because California “has identified no evidence that the speech it compels will produce any measurable effect on emissions.” In August, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California denied the business groups’ request for an injunction, holding that the California laws regulate commercial speech and thus should be subjected to a less stringent level of scrutiny than other types of speech-related regulations. The laws likely satisfy that lower standard, the court said.  One of the laws is set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2026, which is why the business groups came to the Supreme Court before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had weighed in on their appeal of the district court’s decision. The 9th Circuit “set oral argument in the appeal for January 9,” according to the chamber’s Supreme Court brief, and “has not acted...

خلاصہ: SCOTUStoday for Tuesday, November 18Get ready to question how you spent your youth. On this day in 1811, Joseph Story, then just 32 years old, was confirmed to the Supreme Court. He remains the youngest justice to have ever served on the court. SCOTUS Quick Hits In its Monday order list, the court announced that it will hear argument in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, a case on federal immigration law and the government’s authority to prevent asylum seekers from entering the United States. For more on the order list, see the On Site section below. Also on Monday, the Trump administration and lawyers for Illinois and Chicago filed what are expected to be their final briefs on President Donald Trump’s authority to deploy the National Guard to Illinois. Former Justice Stephen Breyer is scheduled to speak to students at Suffolk University in Boston on Thursday morning. The event is closed to the public. Morning Reads Fed Governor Lisa Cook Offers First Defense of Mortgage Records (Nick Timiraos, The Wall Street Journal)(Paywall) — In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, “Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook’s lawyer on Monday provided the first detailed defense of her mortgage applications, arguing that apparent discrepancies in loan documents were either accurate at the time or an ‘inadvertent notation’ that couldn’t constitute fraud given other disclosures to her lenders,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “President Trump has sought to fire cook from the Fed over alleged fraud involving her mortgage applications,” but the “Supreme Court has for now blocked Trump’s attempt to remove her and will hear arguments in January.” Texas National Guard troops expected to leave Chicago and return home, source says (Dalia Faheid, CNN) — As the Supreme Court weighs Trump’s authority to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, some of the troops that have been there awaiting the justices’ decision are heading home, according to CNN. “Two hundred federalized troops had arrived in the city over a month ago with a mission from the Trump administration to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other US Government personnel – but instead stayed waiting at training bases for weeks” because of the legal battle over the deployment. The changes to the deployment are not expected to affect the 300 troops federalized from the Illinois National Guard. Supreme Court not ready to tackle prayers at football games again (Maureen Groppe, USA Today) — In its Monday order list, the court announced that it had “rejected an appeal from a Christian high school that was blocked from leading a communal prayer before a state championship football game,” according to USA Today. “The court’s decision not to get involved doesn’t have a practical effect on Cambridge Christian School, which sued the Florida High School Athletic Association in 2015 after its request to pray over the loudspeaker was denied. Since then, Florida passed legislation requiring the athletic association to allow schools to make opening remarks at games it oversees, and the FHSAA has said that includes communal prayers.” However, it does mean that the court at this time will not further clarify what types of public prayers violate the establishment clause; the school had contended that such clarification was needed to ensure that public programs did not needlessly prevent expressions of faith. US Supreme Court won’t hear patent appeal against Apple, Google, LG (Blake Brittain, Reuters) — Monday’s order list also showed that the court won’t weigh in on a dispute “involving the right to challenge expired patents, leaving in place a win for Apple, Google, and LG Electronics,” according to Reuters. Gesture Technology Partners, which had challenged “a decision to invalidate a patent that it had accused the technology companies of infringing,” had contended that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board does not have the authority to review expired patents and that the case should have been “reviewed by federal courts” instead. Gupta Wessler Nabs High Court Veteran From Justice Department (Alex Ebert, Bloomberg Law)(Paywall) — A seasoned Justice Department lawyer “with thirteen US Supreme Court arguments on his resume” is moving to “plaintiff-side Washington appellate boutique Gupta Wessler,” according to Bloomberg Law. “Matt Guarnieri is joining as a principal, adding another oral advocate to a practice that is already a routine high court player. In a social media post announcing the hire, the firm said its lawyers have now argued 33 cases before the high court—the most in recent years among plaintiff-side groups.” A Closer Look: A Brief History of Supreme Court Clerkships In his latest Empirical SCOTUS column for SCOTUSblog, Adam Feldman explored the idea that a Supreme Court justice’s most lasting legacy is the clerks he or she mentors, because former clerks often go on to exert a significant influence on the federal judiciary, such as by serving as judges (or justices) themselves. But what you may not have realized when reading that column is that this avenue of influence wasn’t available to the justices until the late 19th century, nearly a century after the court began its work. Until then, there was no budget for justices to have a law clerk. Instead, they each had only a messenger, someone who could run opinion drafts or other dispatches back and forth from their home to the homes of the other justices. (There was no Supreme Court building until 1935 – the court would meet in different locations, although principally within the U.S. Capitol building.) The Supreme Court’s clerk situation began to change in the 1880s, when Justice Horace Gray joined the court. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett outlined in her book, Listening to the Law, Gray had gotten used to working with a clerk while serving as a Massachusetts state court judge, and he paid out of pocket to continue having one after he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1882. Four years later, in 1886, Congress appropriated the funds necessary for not just Gray but for every justice to hire a clerk or stenography assistant. The court’s docket was rapidly expanding, and U.S. Attorney General Augustus Garland had advised lawmakers...

خلاصہ: The Supreme Court’s new voting case will test its supposed nonpartisanshipJustice, Democracy, and Law is a recurring series by Edward B. Foley that focuses on election law and the relationship of law and democracy. Please note that the views of outside contributors do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff. Electoral competition in the United States will become increasingly intense next year as the congressional midterms approach and the nation moves towards the 2028 presidential election. The reason for this heightened intensity should be obvious: in addition to the generally accelerating partisan polarization that afflicts U.S. politics, there is the acute strain caused by President Donald Trump’s record of accusing elections of being rigged or stolen when he doesn’t like the outcome or anticipates a potential defeat. No midterm in memory has provoked anything like the anxiety in anticipation of this one. The media is rife with stories about the possible moves Trump might make to undermine the outcome of the midterms to prevent Democrats from regaining a majority in the House of Representatives, which would put them in a position to investigate or even impeach the president yet again. One prominent article in “The Atlantic,” headlined “Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms is Already Underway,” is representative. (Elsewhere I’ve pointed out a detail in this article that is incorrect.) There is reason to be worried. After all, Trump brazenly has endeavored to persuade states, starting with Texas, to engage in an extra round of aggressive gerrymandering in order to tilt the electoral playing field in his (and his party’s) favor. In this context, we can expect that the Supreme Court will be tested by litigation aimed at affecting the outcome of these high-stakes elections. Indeed, the court already has heard Louisiana v. Callais, argued last month, a monumental case involving the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which I have previously written about). Callais will not only have widespread implications far beyond just its effect on next year’s congressional races, but depending on the timing of the decision, could also significantly affect which party controls the House in 2027.   And now the court has granted certiorari in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a case in which the Republican Party is endeavoring to change longstanding practices in many states concerning the receipt and counting of absentee ballots. Currently, 16 states permit absentee ballots to be counted if election officials receive them within a certain period of time after an election so long as they are postmarked and thus cast on or before Election Day. Mississippi, where this case originated, allows five business days for absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive at the local election offices where they will be counted. Although federal laws regulating congressional elections have been amended multiple times in ways that reflect the existence of this well-established state practice, the Republican Party’s lawsuit claims that Congress has enacted a requirement that all absentee ballots must be received by election officials on Election Day and not just postmarked on or before that date.  *** Before delving into the details of the issue in Watson v. RNC, it is worth observing that in general there are two jurisprudential postures that the Supreme Court can take, and has taken, in election cases. One can be described as a pro-democracy posture, in which the court interprets the Constitution and federal statutes insofar as possible to facilitate the operation of a well-functioning democracy. This pro-democracy interpretative stance has a distinguished pedigree, stemming from the civil rights era of the 1960s and articulated most systematically and famously in John Hart Ely’s influential book “Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review,” which I described in my first “Justice, Democracy, and Law” essay for SCOTUSblog. Ely called this jurisprudential approach “representation reinforcing” – a term that nicely captures the fact that it is goal-oriented, aiming to make democracy more democratic, and is not simply striving to interpret the relevant texts according to the most faithful account of their original meaning. Representation-reinforcing constitutional interpretation undertaken by the Warren Court in the 1960s is responsible for the most foundational precedents of modern election law, which sought equal voting rights for all adult citizens.  The other jurisprudential posture can be described as “democracy-neutral” textualism. According to this approach, it is not the judiciary’s job to facilitate democracy. Instead, it is to implement the law as objectively as possible according to whatever the enacted words of the law prescribe and in accordance with whatever values, democratic or otherwise, motivated the enactment of those words. This democracy-neutral textualism has been ascendant during the era of the Roberts court, eclipsing the earlier representation-reinforcing approach. It explains, for example, the outcome in Rucho v. Common Cause, the case in which the court (with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion) refused to condemn as unconstitutional an egregious partisan gerrymander. The court’s decision in Rucho rested on the basic proposition that no textual provision of the Constitution purported to prohibit partisan gerrymanders, and in the absence of such text the court was unwilling to identify and enforce a standard for determining when partisan gerrymanders are impermissible. *** As much as I am a fan of the representation-reinforcing approach, there are sound justifications for being cautious in its use. Democracy is not a monolithic entity. Rather, there are different versions of democracy and thus different plausible conceptions of how a democracy should operate. It is therefore not always clear what the pro-democracy interpretation of the existing enacted law would be in a particular case.  In fact, as a matter of election administration policy, it is not obvious what the pro-democracy position is in Watson v. RNC. Superficially, one might think that letting absentee ballots arrive after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by Election Day is pro-democracy because it facilitates voter participation. But experts in election administration know that absentee voting entails significant risks of inadvertent voter disenfranchisement. Casting an absentee ballot is much more vulnerable to voter error than in-person voting at a polling place: absentee ballot envelopes must be filled out correctly and, regardless of the date they are due to arrive...

خلاصہ: The case that turned the justices into art criticsIn Dissent is a recurring series by Anastasia Boden on Supreme Court dissents that have shaped (or reshaped) our country. I. The artist formerly known as Prince It was 1981, and Prince was not yet Prince. He was Prince Rogers Nelson, an “up and coming” 22-year-old artist, whom Lynn Goldsmith persuaded Newsweek to allow her to photograph. Prince may have been a newcomer, but Goldsmith was not. She was a respected rock-and-roll photographer known for her intimate portraits of rockstars, including Van Halen, James Brown, and Mick Jagger. In Prince she saw someone still figuring out who he was before the world decided that he was a star. She sat him in front of a simple white backdrop. Nothing grand. His eyes dark, steady, but vulnerable. What resulted was a portrait of a man with power not yet claimed. Goldsmith’s studio photos of Prince didn’t end up running in Newsweek, but she held onto them – and her copyright. Three years later, another artist would see in that same face something entirely different. Andy Warhol would Warhol-ize Goldsmith’s photo and produce an image of Prince as a music icon. Decades later, these two contrasting portraits of Prince would wind up at the Supreme Court, with Goldsmith claiming copyright infringement and Warhol’s foundation claiming “fair use.” The parties called on the justices to decide whether Warhol had sufficiently transformed Goldsmith’s photo to avoid copyright infringement.  A seven-justice majority said he had not. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan used paintings, music, and literature to school the majority on art history – and the very nature of judging. II. The silkscreen Three years after Goldsmith photographed young Prince, Vanity Fair called. The magazine was running a profile on the artist, now ascendant after his album “1999.” The magazine paid Goldsmith $400 for a one-time license of her photo as an “artist’s reference.” They gave the portrait to Warhol, who flattened the shadows, used a silkscreen to carve the jawline into hard angles, and drenched the face in a pop of bright purple. He was not trying to capture a person; he was illustrating Prince as an icon. While Goldsmith had captured Prince while he was still rising, Vanity Fair’s piece, by contrast, was titled, “Purple Fame: An Appreciation of Prince at the Height of His Powers.” The magazine printed Warhol’s silkscreen and credited Goldsmith for the original photograph in small text. Unbeknownst to Goldsmith, Warhol hadn’t stopped with one image. He had made over a dozen silkscreen prints and kept them in his private collection. In addition to a purple Prince, there was an orange Prince and a blue Prince. There were 14 silkscreens and two pencil drawings in all. Warhol once said, “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.” In that vein, he had repeated Prince’s flattened image in several colors, showing a man whose humanity becomes harder to access as he becomes more famous.  Decades passed, with Prince selling over 150 million records worldwide and reinventing himself along the way, all while staying notoriously protective of his image. He released 39 studio albums, including “Sign o’ the Times,” “Purple Rain,” and “The Slaughterhouse” (no relation to Justice Stephen Field’s masterful dissent in The Slaughter-house Cases). He set several records, including being the first artist to simultaneously have a number one film, album, and single in the U.S. In 1993, he adopted an unpronounceable symbol as his name to protest what he saw as his label’s copyright of his very identity. In 2000, he reclaimed his old moniker. He notoriously hated compulsory licensing laws, which allowed other artists to cover his songs without his permission, and repeatedly refused Weird Al’s requests to parody his work. In 2010, Prince even fought to remove a mother’s video from YouTube that depicted her baby dancing to “Let’s Go Crazy,” eventually resulting in a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.  In 2016, he died.  That same year, Vanity Fair’s parent company Condé Nast sought to use Warhol’s image once again for a tribute cover. But this time, they discovered Warhol’s trove of other Prince images. And rather than reprinting Purple Prince, they chose to run Orange Prince, paying Warhol’s foundation $10,000 for it. Goldsmith picked up the magazine and recognized the vulnerable face she had photographed staring back at her – printed without her permission. She called the foundation and notified them that she believed they had infringed her copyright. The foundation then sued Goldsmith, seeking a declaratory judgment that Warhol’s use of her photo wasn’t infringement, or, alternatively, that it was “fair use.” III. The legal frame Fair use is a statutory defense to copyright infringement claims premised on the idea that, without room to remix, innovation will freeze. In a case in 1994 involving 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” the Supreme Court drew on Justice Joseph story when ruling that the “central purpose” of the fair use investigation is to determine whether the new work “adds something new,” “altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.” “n other words,” it asks “whether and to what extent the new work is ‘transformative.’” If the second piece is deemed transformative, it’s then considered a fair use of the original. Even though both the parody and the original piece in that case were used for commercial purposes (to sell music), the court ruled that 2 Live Crew’s lyrics (“Big hairy woman you need to shave that stuff/Big hairy woman you know I bet it’s tough”) transformed the original into something different altogether.   Courts consider four factors under the “fair use” test, but only the first factor – the “purpose and character” of the new work – was at issue in Goldsmith’s case. The district court had ruled that the factor weighed in Warhol’s favor because he had transformed the original work’s style and meaning. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reversed, ruling that adding new expression wasn’t enough. What mattered more, according to the 2nd Circuit, was...

خلاصہ: SCOTUStoday for Monday, November 17On this day in 1980, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Stone v. Graham, which said that a Kentucky statute requiring a copy of the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause. The decision is back in the spotlight as several states seek to implement similar policies on Ten Commandments displays, as SCOTUSblog reported this summer. SCOTUS Quick Hits On Friday, the justices took part in a private conference and discussed cases and petitions for review. Today, the court is expected to release an order list at 9:30 a.m. EST, in which it will potentially announce additional cases that it has decided to hear this term. Later today, the Trump administration and lawyers for Illinois and Chicago will file what are expected to be their final briefs on President Donald Trump’s authority to deploy the National Guard to Illinois. Morning Reads Supreme Court urged to block California laws requiring companies to disclose climate impacts (David G. Savage and Hayley Smith, Los Angeles Times) — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have filed an interim docket application asking the Supreme Court “to block new California laws that will require thousands of companies to disclose their emissions and their impacts on climate change,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “Their lawyers argue the measures violate the 1st Amendment because the state would be forcing companies to speak on its preferred topic.” The companies went to the Supreme Court after losing in front of a district court and while waiting for a response from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. “In August, U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II in Los Angeles refused to block the laws on the grounds they ‘regulate commercial speech,’ which gets less protection under the 1st Amendment.” Judge says he’ll approve opioid settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue and Sackler family (Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press) — U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane announced on Friday that he will approve “OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic,” according to the Associated Press. “The deal … would require members of the Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7 billion over 15 years. The new agreement replaces one the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits.” Under the new deal, “ost of the money is to go to state and local governments to be used in their efforts to mitigate damage of the opioid epidemic.” Trump Implements Major Rollback of Food Tariffs (Gavin Bade, The Wall Street Journal)(Paywall) — President Donald Trump is adjusting his trade strategy as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of the tariffs he imposed using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. On Friday, “Trump issued an executive order modifying the reciprocal tariffs he imposed on virtually every trading partner in August, exempting more than a hundred common food items including fruits, nuts and spices,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “The move is part of a shift from the administration to water down some of its so-called reciprocal tariffs in the face of both price increases for consumers and legal uncertainty following a high-stakes Supreme Court hearing this month. In their place, the administration has expanded other tariffs on individual industries like steel, aluminum and automobiles based on more established national security law—Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.” Catholic preschools appeal to Supreme Court in Colorado case over LGBTQ rights and religious liberty (Ann Schimke, Chalkbeat) — After a loss in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, two “Denver-area Catholic parishes asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to reconsider lower court decision that said parish preschools participating in Colorado’s state-funded preschool program couldn’t deny admission to LGBTQ children or children from LGBTQ families,” according to Chalkbeat. The Catholic schools contend that Colorado is engaged in unlawful religious discrimination. “If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, the justices could answer a question at the heart of the case: Can private religious schools that accept public education dollars refuse to enroll certain kids based on religious principles? The state and two lower courts have said no.” The GOP May Not Need a New Law to Make Judges More Compliant (Michael Bobelian, Time) — In a post for Time’s Made by History series, Michael Bobelian drew comparisons between the pressure the Supreme Court faces today as it considers high-profile challenges to the Trump administration’s signature policies and the pressure it faced in the 1950s, as “congressional conservatives pushed to rein in the Warren Court for rulings that challenged and undercut the red-baiting that characterized the era of McCarthyism. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson thwarted their push, but it still helped to temper the Court’s activism for several years, until the arrival of new justices and a more favorable political climate produced another wave of landmark opinions,” Bobelian wrote. A Closer Look: Duran v. United States When it comes to the interim docket, those cases concerning the extent of President Donald Trump’s executive authority typically generate the most notice. The case of Duran v. United States, however, while having little to do with the president of the United States, is also of note. Duran is about competing claims to $40 million in a New York bank account. This money comes from the estate of Ferdinand Marcos, the former leader of the Philippines, who died in 1989, and, according to a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, “stole billions of dollars from the Republic and its people and used networks of foreign financial accounts and shell corporations to hide stolen funds.” After years of litigating, multiple victims of Marcos’ schemes obtained judgments against his estate, including the Republic of the Philippines and a class of 9,539 individuals who suffered (or whose families suffered) at the hands of the Marcos...

خلاصہ: Court turns down hearing cases on prison construction, school prayerOver the objections of three justices, the Supreme Court on Monday turned down an appeal from the sheriff of New Orleans in a dispute over the city’s obligation to build a new facility for inmates with mental health issues. The dispute began more than a dozen years ago, when inmates at the prison in Orleans Parish went to federal court. They argued that the facilities there violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because they did not provide adequate housing for inmates with mental health conditions. In 2013, the district court approved a consent judgment with a plan to address the constitutional violations. Several years later, the construction of a new treatment facility with 89 beds for inmates with mental health needs was added to the plan. But in 2020, New Orleans asked the court to lift its orders requiring the city to move forward with the construction of the new facility, on the theory that conditions had changed. The district court rejected the request, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that decision. A new sheriff, Susan Hutson, returned to court, once again seeking to end the city’s obligation to build the new facility. She pointed to a provision of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a federal law that was intended to reduce frivolous lawsuits by inmates, which provides for the cut-off of future-oriented relief after two years. The district court turned down the new request, and the 5th Circuit agreed.   Hutson came to the Supreme Court in the spring, asking the justices to decide whether she was required to do anything other than showing that two years had passed since the entry of the plan. A new sheriff, Michelle Woodfork, was elected on Oct. 11; she will take office in May. After considering the case at five consecutive conferences, the court on Monday rejected Hutson’s appeal. Justice Neil Gorsuch indicated, without offering an explanation, that he would have granted her petition for review. Justice Samuel Alito, in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from the denial of Hutson’s petition. He wrote that “because the prison-building injunction was illegal from the beginning, the courts below should have terminated it.” But in any event, he continued, the lower courts should have required the challengers, not the sheriff, to show that the consent judgment and the plan were still needed. “By failing to intervene,” he said, “we leave New Orleans to pay for the Fifth Circuit’s serious errors.” The court declined to take up a petition filed by a Christian school in Florida in a case involving prayers at a high school football game. Cambridge Christian School had asked the justices to review a ruling by a federal appeals court in favor of the Florida High School Athletic Association, which had turned down the school’s request to use the loudspeaker before a state championship game for a prayer. The FHSAA told the school that it believed that allowing such a prayer would violate the Constitution’s establishment clause, which bars the government from establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled for the FHSAA, and the Supreme Court on Monday left that decision in place. Finally, the court asked the federal government for its views in a dispute between Nebraska and Colorado over water. There is no timetable for the U.S. solicitor general to file his brief. Also on Monday, the court added one new case, a challenge to the Trump administration’s now-rescinded policy of turning back asylum seekers before they reach the U.S.- Mexico border, to its argument docket for the 2025-26 term; that grant was covered by SCOTUSblog in a separate story earlier on Monday. The post Court turns down hearing cases on prison construction, school prayer appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Source InformationPublisher: ScotusBlogOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: Supreme Court agrees to hear case on border crossingsThe Supreme Court on Monday agreed to review a ruling by a federal appeals court that, the Trump administration contends, “has already caused—and, if left in place, will continue to cause—‘untold interference with the Executive Branch’s ability to manage the southern border.’” The immigrant rights group and asylum seekers who filed the lawsuit had urged the justices to leave the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in place, telling them that the government’s argument “would empower border officials to render” federal law governing the processing of asylum seekers “wholly inoperable at ports of entry.” Under federal immigration law, a noncitizen “who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States … whether or not at a designated port of arrival … may apply for asylum.” Noncitizens who arrive at a port of entry and indicate that they want to seek asylum are inspected and processed – that is, screened by border officials and then channeled into the asylum system, which may include either an interview with an asylum officer or proceedings in immigration court. In 2016, in response to a surge in the number of Haitian immigrants seeking asylum in San Ysidro, outside San Diego, the Department of Homeland Security initiated a policy known as “metering”: Customs and Border Patrol officials turned back asylum seekers before they entered the United States. The policy was expanded to all ports of entry across the U.S. border with Mexico, and it was formalized in a memorandum in 2018. Al Otro Lado, an immigrant rights group, and 13 asylum seekers went to federal court in California, where they argued that the metering policy violated the federal law governing administrative agencies. The key question before the 9th Circuit was whether asylum seekers who were turned away from ports of entry before they could enter the United States had “arrived in” the United States for purposes of being able to apply for asylum under federal immigration law. By a vote of 2-1, the court of appeals agreed with the challengers that they had. “The phrase ‘physically present in the United States,’” Judge Michelle Friedland wrote, “encompasses noncitizens within our borders, and the phrase ‘arrives in the United States’ encompasses those who encounter officials at the border, whichever side of the border they are standing on.” Moreover, she continued, an asylum seeker who arrives at the border must then be inspected and processed. A deeply divided full court of appeals declined to reconsider the case. In a dissent joined by 11 other judges, Judge Daniel Bress wrote that the panel’s holding “violates clear statutory text, precedent, the presumption against” applying U.S. law outside the United States, “and long-held understandings limiting application of the asylum and inspection laws to aliens ‘in’ the United States—which aliens in Mexico are not.” The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court in July, asking the justices to weigh in. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer echoed Bress’ dissent, telling the court that the 9th Court’s ruling “defies the plain text of the governing statutes. In ordinary English, a person ‘arrives in’ a country only when he comes within its borders. An alien thus does not ‘arrive in’ the United States while he is still in Mexico.” The challengers argued that because “the government rescinded the metering policy years ago,” the question that the Trump administration has asked the court to decide “has almost no present implications, and likely no future implications.” The post Supreme Court agrees to hear case on border crossings appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Source InformationPublisher: ScotusBlogOriginal Source: Read more

خلاصہ: SCOTUStoday for Thursday, November 13The Supreme Court wrapped up its arguments for the November sitting yesterday and announced what cases it will hear in January. Mark your calendars accordingly – we certainly have! SCOTUS Quick Hits Tomorrow, the justices will take part in a private conference and discuss cases and petitions for review. On Monday, the court is expected to release an order list at 9:30 a.m. EST providing, among other things, additional cases that it has decided to hear this term. Also on Monday, the Trump administration and lawyers for Illinois and Chicago will file what are expected to be their final briefs on President Donald Trump’s authority to deploy the National Guard to Illinois. Morning Reads Tariffs are on trial, but US trade talks are moving full steam ahead (Ari Hawkins, Daniel Desrochers, and Phelim Kine, Politico)(Paywall) — The Supreme Court soon may strike down a “large chunk” of President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs, but that’s not stopping the country’s trading partners from coming to the negotiating table, according to Politico. “According to more than half a dozen foreign diplomats and people close to the negotiations, some of whom were granted anonymity to discuss strategy, other governments continue to press for deals to avoid President Donald Trump’s tariffs on sectors like autos and steel and others (as well as threatened ones on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors), which are not affected by the court challenge. And they are betting the administration will be able to use other laws to reimpose at least some of the duties that could be struck down.” But some of these sources told Politico that they expect a ruling against the tariffs to “weaken” the president’s “bargaining power.” Purdue Pharma urges bankruptcy judge to approve $7.4 billion opioid settlement (Nate Raymond, Reuters) — Attorneys for Purdue Pharma appeared before a bankruptcy judge on Wednesday to urge the judge “to approve a restructuring plan that includes a $7.4 billion settlement resolving claims that the drugmaker’s sales of addictive pain medications fueled the U.S. opioid epidemic,” according to Reuters. “The plan significantly amends a prior bankruptcy settlement that Purdue was forced to rework after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024 rejected it and forced the company to scale back legal protections for its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family.” During the Wednesday hearing, attorneys said the new plan has been approved by “more than 99%” of Purdue’s creditors, with the key exception being “a small number of individuals pursuing claims against Purdue without legal counsel.” Berkeley Law Dean Urges Supreme Court to Be ‘Guardrail of Our Democracy’ (Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed) — Erwin Chemerinsky, a SCOTUSblog contributor and dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, spoke at a conference this week about the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with colleges and universities and called on the Supreme Court to do more to rein in the president, including in the area of higher ed, according to Inside Higher Ed. “Ultimately, I believe the guardrail of our democracy has to be the courts and the Supreme Court,” Chemerinsky said. “If there is going to be a check on a president who has authoritarian impulses, it’s going to have to be from the restraints of the Constitution—and the only way we can enforce those is the courts.” The Supreme Court Just Took a Scary Voting Case That Has Trump Salivating. He Might Be Disappointed (Richard L. Hasen, Slate) — In a column for Slate, Richard L. Hasen explored what’s at stake in the Supreme Court’s new case on mail-in ballots. If the Supreme Court upholds the decision barring Mississippi from counting ballots that arrive after Election Day, “29 states and the District of Columbia would have to change their laws to require receipt of virtually all ballots by Election Day, aside from a small class of ballots including those from military and overseas voters,” he contended. Hasen expressed his hope that the court will “let Mississippi make the policy choice to accept ballots postmarked by Election Day” and said such a ruling would comply with “text, law, and practice.” Federal Appellate Judges Can Petition the Supreme Court to Review a Question (Eugene Volokh, The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason) — In a post for Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Eugene Volokh highlighted a lesser-known way a case can make it to the Supreme Court: at the request of judges. “t turns out that federal appellate judges (as few as a two-judge majority on a court of appeals panel) can themselves ask the Supreme Court to review a question, though technically the procedure is called a ‘certification’ rather than a petition,” he wrote. But, Volokh continued, “in practice the Court almost never agrees to hear such certified questions; the last time it did that was in 1981.” A Closer Look: The First Step Act The justices heard arguments yesterday in the cases of Fernandez v. United States and Rutherford v. United States, both of which center around what qualifies as “extraordinary and compelling reasons” for sentence reductions under the First Step Act’s compassionate-release provision. The First Step Act was a bipartisan measure enacted in 2018 under President Donald Trump to reduce penalties for certain drug offenses, expand rehabilitation opportunities, and reform what were viewed as overly harsh sentencing practices. (Perhaps it gained the most publicity through Kim Kardashian, who publicly lobbied for its passage.) Among its specific reforms, the FSA amended 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) to curb “stacking,” where multiple firearm convictions in one proceeding triggered consecutive 25-year minimums – a practice that, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, disproportionately affected Black men. And with regard to compassionate release, the statute allows inmates to petition courts directly for reductions based on “extraordinary and compelling reasons,” rather than depending on the Bureau of Prisons to do so on an inmate’s behalf, as was previously required. Yesterday’s cases were not the first time the FSA has come before the Supreme Court. In Terry v. United States, decided in 2021, the court held that individuals convicted of certain low-level crack-cocaine offenses did not qualify for sentencing reductions under the FSA. The...