Covering the Supreme Court and the Judiciary in (mostly) Plain English

Over the objection of four justices, the Supreme Court tonight blocked Missouri from executing Russell Bucklew, who was scheduled to die tonight. Bucklew was convicted for the 1996 murder of Michael Sanders, who was living at the time with Bucklew’s former girlfriend, Stephanie Ray. Bucklew kidnapped and raped Ray, and he wounded a state trooper… Read More

The Supreme Court heard oral argument today in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a highly anticipated case that combines two often controversial topics: the First Amendment and abortion. The question before the justices today was whether a California law that directs “crisis pregnancy centers” to provide their patients with specific kinds… Read More

When Mark Sveen died in 2011, his life insurance policy still named his ex-wife, Kaye Melin, as the beneficiary – even though the couple had divorced four years before. Nothing in the Minnesota couple’s divorce settlement (which divided up, among other things, the all-terrain-vehicle and the snowmobile) addressed the fate of Mark’s insurance policy, and… Read More

One day before the filing deadline for the primary election, the Supreme Court rejected a request by Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania to block a remedial plan adopted by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court from going into effect. The ruling means that the state’s 2018 congressional elections will likely go forward under the new maps, which could… Read More

Seven months after an Arizona inmate asked the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the death penalty itself, the court today declined to do so. The order denying certiorari in the case of Abel Hidalgo, who shot and killed two men as part of a murder-for-hire scheme in 2000, was accompanied by a 10-page… Read More

The story of Mark Sveen and Kaye Melin is (at least according to Mark’s children, Ashley and Antone) a familiar one. After the couple married in 1997, Mark named Kaye as the primary beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. A decade later, they divorced, but Mark never changed the designation on his insurance. This meant that… Read More

This morning the Supreme Court issued orders from last week’s conference, adding two new cases to its merits docket for next term. Although neither case involves the kind of high-profile issue that is likely to make front-page news, both present significant legal questions that lawyers and law professors will certainly follow closely. With its announcement… Read More

When Andy Cilek went to his local polling place in Hennepin County, Minnesota, to vote, an election worker told him to cover or take off his T-shirt, which bore both the Tea Party logo and the message “Don’t Tread on Me.” Cilek, the worker said, would have to do the same for his “Please I.D…. Read More

Less than three weeks ago, the Supreme Court declined to get involved in a partisan-gerrymandering challenge to Pennsylvania’s federal congressional maps. Today that state’s Republican lawmakers returned to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to block what they characterized as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s “intentional seizure of the redistricting process.” During their first trip to… Read More

When the Supreme Court heard oral argument this morning in United States v. Microsoft, it found itself in what has become familiar terrain — trying to apply a decades-old law to modern technology. Today the justices were interpreting what Justice Anthony Kennedy characterized as a “difficult statute”: the Stored Communications Act, a 1986 law that… Read More