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

The Supreme Court on Thursday granted a request from the Biden administration to allow federal Border Patrol agents to cut or move razor wire installed by Texas along a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border. Three migrants – a woman and two children – drowned on Jan. 12 near the disputed area, the Biden administration told… Read More

Eight years after the Supreme Court blocked his execution so that it could consider a challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol, the justices agreed on Monday to take up the case of Richard Glossip, who is seeking to set aside his conviction and death sentence. In an unusual twist, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond supported Glossip’s petition… Read More

It has been nearly 40 years since the Supreme Court indicated in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. After more than three-and-a-half hours of oral argument on Wednesday, it seemed unlikely that the rule outlined in that case, known as the Chevron… Read More

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Wednesday in a case involving the deference that courts should give to federal agencies’ interpretations of the laws that they administer. From health care to finance to environmental pollutants, administrative agencies use highly trained experts to interpret and carry out federal laws. Although the case may sound… Read More

In 2018, in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, & Municipal Employees, the Supreme Court held that government employees who are represented by a union but do not belong to that union cannot be required to pay a fee to cover the union’s costs to negotiate a contract that applies to all employees. On… Read More

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether an Oregon city can enforce its ban on public camping against homeless people. The announcement came as part of a short list of orders released from the justices’ private conference earlier in the day adding five new cases to the court’s merits docket. The court’s ruling… Read More

The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared sympathetic to an Arizona man who contends that his constitutional rights were violated when an expert witness testified for the prosecution about drug analysis performed by another forensic scientist. Jason Smith alleges that the expert’s testimony contravened the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause, which gives defendants in criminal cases the… Read More

Despite a suggestion by Justice Neil Gorsuch that there was “radical agreement” in a California man’s challenge to the constitutionality of the “traffic impact mitigation” fee that he was required to pay when building his home, the justices appeared divided at oral argument on Tuesday. There may have been something approaching a consensus that (contrary… Read More

Jason Smith claims that when an expert witness testified in Arizona’s drug possession case against him using drug analysis performed by a former state employee, it violated his constitutional rights. The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Wednesday in his case, Smith v. Arizona. The Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause provides that “in all criminal… Read More

The Supreme Court on Monday heard oral argument in a dispute over whether a lawsuit filed by an Oregon man who was placed on the No Fly List can go forward when the government has removed him from the list and pledged not to return him to it “based on the currently available information.” After… Read More