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

After four days of testimony (occasionally interrupted by protesters), the Senate Judiciary Committee wrapped up hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. I cover today’s events, which focused on witness testimony for and against Kavanaugh, in this podcast.

The Senate Judiciary Committee today held a third day of hearings on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve as a justice on the Supreme Court. Here’s my rundown, in less than three minutes.

Day 2 of the Kavanaugh hearings began at 9:30 am and ended after 10 pm, but I boil it down to the highlights in just under four minutes in this podcast. Enjoy!

No time to follow events at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court? No problem — I have a brief (under two-and-a-half minutes) rundown on today’s events, in my new podcast.

The Supreme Court today declined to intervene in a dispute between the city of Philadelphia and Catholic Social Services over foster care and the Catholic Church’s position on same-sex marriage. Catholic Social Services had asked the justices to block an “intake freeze” on the new placements of foster children in the agency’s foster-care program while… Read More

Earlier this week the Senate Judiciary Committee released another batch of documents from (among other things) Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s stint in the White House counsel’s office. This post is not about those documents, because I just finished reviewing an earlier batch (totaling approximately 80,000 pages) of emails from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House.

In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled in Whren v. United States that police can stop and seize a motorist as long as they have probable cause to suspect a moving violation, even if the seizure is actually a pretext to search for evidence of other crimes. When the justices meet for their September 24 conference,… Read More

In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that a mandatory sentence of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Four years later, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the justices explained that their decision in Miller did bar life without parole “for all… Read More

The Supreme Court released the argument calendar for its November sitting, which begins on Monday, October 29. During the six days of the November sitting, the justices will hear oral arguments in 12 cases, involving topics that range from the proper method of service for a foreign country to pre-emption by the Atomic Energy Act…. Read More

Although the battle over records related to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s tenure in the George W. Bush White House continues, the Senate Judiciary Committee has recently released over 100,000 pages of documents. The first batch of documents, released last week, contained over 5,000 pages of emails from Kavanaugh’s stint as an associate White House counsel, a… Read More