This afternoon the justices issued orders from today’s private conference, adding one new case to their merits docket for the term. They agreed to review the case of Terry Honeycutt, who worked as a salaried employee at a hardware store owned by his brother, Tony. The two brothers were charged with federal drug crimes for… Read More

Bassam Salman, a Chicago grocery wholesaler, received stock tips from a friend, who had in turn received inside information from Salman’s brother-in-law, an investment banker at Citigroup. Salman made hundreds of thousands of dollars from the tips, but he was also charged with insider trading and sentenced to three years in prison. Today the Supreme… Read More

When the justices return to the bench in January, they will face a nearly full argument calendar: nine arguments over five days of oral arguments. (No arguments are scheduled on the tenth day in the sitting, January 16, because it is a federal holiday.) The January calendar, which was released yesterday, includes several high-profile cases,… Read More

In overviews of the Supreme Court’s current term, the conventional wisdom is that the court is mostly shying away from controversial cases and topics, as it waits to learn when it will have a ninth justice and who that justice will be. There are currently no cases on the docket involving, for example, abortion, affirmative… Read More

It was, as attorney Clifford Sloan – who represents Texas death-row inmate Bobby James Moore – a “vitally important, life-or-death” issue: Does the scheme that Texas uses to determine whether an inmate is intellectually disabled, and therefore cannot be executed, violate the Constitution? Perhaps reflecting the significance of the case, today’s oral argument included some… Read More

In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment bars the execution of individuals who are intellectually disabled. The court did not, however, provide detailed guidelines on how states should determine whether someone is intellectually disabled, leaving that job to the states. Twelve years later,… Read More

Only hours after Donald Trump was declared the winner in last night’s presidential election, it was business as usual in at least one Washington institution: the Supreme Court of the United States. With the seat left open by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia still vacant, presumably to be filled with the president-elect’s nominee, the… Read More

In 2013, the city of Miami filed what seemed to many to be an ambitious lawsuit against Bank of America and Wells Fargo. It argued that the two banks had discriminated against African-American and Latino borrowers in issuing mortgages that were particularly likely to lead to foreclosure. The foreclosures were widespread, with near-catastrophic effects on… Read More

Today the justices heard oral argument in a challenge to the government’s interpretation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, a law that (among other things) allows the duties and responsibilities of an executive branch official who requires Senate confirmation to be carried out by someone else, serving in an acting capacity. As I… Read More

One day after the Ohio Democratic Party asked the Supreme Court to reinstate a federal district court’s order that barred the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump from attempting to intimidate voters in the state, the justices denied the Democrats’ request. Perhaps because the result was sufficiently clear, or perhaps because the election is… Read More