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

There was high drama at the Supreme Court last night, in the case of an Alabama death-row inmate who sought a last-minute stay of his execution, which was originally scheduled for 6 p.m. CST yesterday. Although the court would twice put a temporary hold on the executions, his flurry of filings was ultimately to no… Read More

Today the Supreme Court announced a new briefing schedule for Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., the case of a transgender student who identifies as a boy and wants to be able to use the boys’ bathroom at his Virginia high school. The revised schedule extends the time for each side to file its main… 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

“It is a very tough matter,” observed Justice Stephen Breyer, summarizing the questions with which the justices were grappling today. Federal law permits (and sometimes requires) states to consider race when drawing district lines, to create legislative districts in which a majority of voters are members of a minority group, but at the same time… 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

Following yesterday’s dismissal of Visa v. Osborn and Visa v. Stoumbos, the Supreme Court today issued a new calendar for its December sitting, which begins on November 28. The two Visa cases, which had been consolidated for one hour of oral arguments, had been scheduled for argument on Wednesday, December 7 — the only argument… 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