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

Less than a week ago, the Supreme Court granted a request by North Carolina Republicans to block (at least temporarily) an order by a three-judge federal court in that state that would have required the state legislature to submit a new federal congressional map today. The federal court ruled that the state’s Republicans had engaged… Read More

The Supreme Court released the calendar for its March sitting, which begins on March 19. The justices will hear nine hours of oral argument over six days, with three of those days featuring two hours of argument each and the other three slated for just one hour each. One of the highest-profile cases of the… Read More

This morning the Supreme Court issued additional orders from last week’s conference. On Friday, the justices announced that they would review Hawaii’s challenge to the most recent iteration of the president’s “travel ban.” Today the court granted review in an environmental-law case, Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The star of Weyerhaeuser’s case… Read More

Almost 10 years ago, Theodore Wesby attended a party in the northeast section of Washington, D.C., that his own attorney would later describe as “raucous.” There were strippers offering lap dances, plenty of alcohol, people having sex upstairs, and (at least the smell of) marijuana. The celebration ended abruptly, however, when police received complaints about… Read More

In 2010, Andrew Cilek went to his local polling place in Hennepin County, Minnesota, to vote. Cilek was wearing a T-shirt that had three different images on it: the Tea Party logo, the message “Don’t Tread on Me,” and an image of the Gadsden flag, which dates back to the American Revolution but is often… Read More

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on the challenge to President Donald Trump’s September 24 order, the latest version of what is often known as his “travel ban,” which limited travel from eight countries: Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Venezuela and Chad. The announcement, which came in a brief order today, had… Read More

In June 2012, President Barack Obama signed a policy known as “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (popularly known as DACA), a program that allows undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children to apply for protection from deportation. Today the federal government went to the Supreme Court, asking it to intervene immediately in… Read More

Last week a three-judge federal court in North Carolina struck down the state’s federal congressional map, ruling that Republicans had drawn the map to give themselves an advantage over Democrats – specifically, the court stressed, to guarantee Republicans’ “domination of the state’s congressional delegation.” The court ordered the state legislature to come up with a… Read More

The Supreme Court heard oral argument today in the case of Robert McCoy, a Louisiana death-row inmate who says that he should get a new trial because his own lawyer told jurors that he was guilty – over McCoy’s express objection. After just over an hour of spirited debate, the justices seemed sympathetic to McCoy’s… Read More

The Supreme Court heard oral argument today in the case of several members of the armed forces, who were convicted by military courts-martial of offenses ranging from the relatively minor (wrongful use of a controlled substance) to the serious (sexual misconduct). They appealed to the military courts of criminal appeals (CCAs), where their convictions were… Read More