Before Justice Antonin Scalia died last year, the Supreme Court agreed to review a church’s challenge to Missouri’s denial of the church’s application for a grant to resurface its playground. The church contended that its exclusion from the state-run program violated the U.S. Constitution by discriminating against religious institutions, while the state countered that the… Read More

Today the Supreme Court agreed to review rulings by two lower courts blocking the implementation of President Donald Trump’s March 6 executive order, popularly known as the “travel ban.” Citing national-security concerns, the order imposed a freeze on new visas from six Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). But the full U.S…. Read More

The justices are expected to take the bench on Monday at 10 a.m. to issue opinions in argued cases. There are six decisions still outstanding, involving everything from cross-border shootings to the death penalty and public funding for playgrounds at religious preschools. To be sure, there is no guarantee that we will actually get opinions… Read More

Yesterday the Supreme Court sent the case of a Bosnian Serb woman who was stripped of her citizenship for lying to immigration officials back to the lower courts. The justices rejected the government’s argument that Divna Maslenjak could lose her citizenship simply by making false statements, no matter how trivial. Instead, the court ruled, Maslenjak’s… Read More

This morning the justices upheld the convictions of seven men who had been convicted of the brutal beating, sodomy, and murder of Catherine Fuller, a District of Columbia mother of six, in 1984. Writing for the court in Turner v. United States, Justice Stephen Breyer concluded that even if the prosecutors had given the defense… Read More

In 2000, Divna Maslenjak and her family came to the United States as refugees from the former Yugoslavia, fleeing the civil war in that country. Maslenjak became a U.S. citizen in 2007, but several years later she was stripped of her citizenship and deported – as was her husband – because immigration officials discovered that… Read More

This morning the Trump administration responded to yesterday’s brief by the state of Hawaii, which urged the justices to stay out of the dispute over the March 6 executive order, often known as the “travel ban,” which put a hold on visas for travelers from six Muslim-majority countries. Although Hawaii argued yesterday that a June… Read More

Calling the March 6 executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which put a temporary hold on visas for travelers from six Muslim-majority countries, “grossly unlawful,” the state of Hawaii today urged the Supreme Court to sit out the litigation over the legality of the order, popularly known as the “travel ban.” Instead, the state… Read More

During the almost 16 years since the September 11 attacks, litigation challenging the treatment of Middle Eastern men who were in the United States illegally at the time of the attacks and were detained for immigration violations has continued to wind its way through the courts. Several of those detainees, who are the plaintiffs in… Read More

When an inmate being held in a state prison believes that his conviction or sentence violated the U.S. Constitution, he can go to federal court to seek relief – a process known as “habeas corpus.” But once he is in federal court, it is not enough for the inmate to show simply that the state… Read More