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

A little over three years ago, Abigail Fisher was at the Supreme Court for oral arguments in her challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process. She won a partial victory in that round: the Court sent her case back to the lower court, with instructions for… Read More

Sue Evenwel lives in Mount Pleasant, Texas, a town east of Dallas with a population of approximately fifteen thousand. Mount Pleasant is part of the state senate’s District 1, which has just over 800,000 residents – 584,000 of whom are registered voters. By contrast, although a more urban district near Evenwel has a roughly equal… Read More

Both of my random thoughts are related to the briefing in Green v. Brennan, which I previewed for SCOTUSblog earlier this week. First, you don’t see many parent-child combos at the Court, but the counsel of record in an amicus brief on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund was John Paul Schnapper-… Read More

The December hearing list has been released. Once again, there are lots of repeat players arguing in the two-week sitting that starts (counterintuitively) on November 30, including (but not limited to) Brian Wolfman, Jon Hacker, Peter Stris, Seth Waxman, Neal Katyal, Paul Clement, Bartow Farr, Will Consovoy, Bert Rein, Paul Smith, and Greg Garre.  Also some… Read More

The Court has released the hearing list for the November sitting, which begins on Monday, November 2.  As seems to increasingly be the case, several titans of the Supreme Court bar will be appearing:  Andrew Pincus (24 arguments), Neal Katyal (25), Carter Phillips (81!), and David Frederick (40+, according to his firm bio). It is… Read More

Going into today’s oral arguments in Montgomery v. Louisiana, many Court watchers would have said that there were two main things to look for. First, did the Court seem likely to rule that its 2012 decision in Miller v. Alabama – prohibiting mandatory sentences of life in prison, without the possibility of parole, for juveniles… Read More

I’ll have my Plain English recap of today’s oral arguments in Montgomery v. Louisiana soon, as soon as I figure out what to say. A few random thoughts until then: Justice Kagan once again proved that she is the hippest Justice, twice referring to “life without parole” sentences as “L-WOP.” It wasn’t a good day… Read More

Since 1963, Henry Montgomery (now sixty-nine years old) has been in a Louisiana prison, serving a mandatory sentence of life without parole for the murder of Charles Hurt, a deputy sheriff in East Baton Rouge. A newspaper article published shortly after Hurt’s death suggested that Montgomery, who had turned seventeen just a few weeks before… Read More

Fun fact: A female lawyer showed up to sit in the bar section wearing a stylish black sleeveless dress. It was lovely, but the bar section requires jackets, so she had to borrow one from a male friend in the public gallery. Not-so-fun fact: Assistant to the Solicitor General Rachel Kovner wasn’t simply the only… Read More

Much has been written about Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court and a pivotal Justice on hot-button issues – including by O’Connor herself in not one but two memoirs. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in 1993 became the second woman on the Court, isn’t far behind her: although she has said that… Read More