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

In 2009, James Kahler shot and killed four members of his family – his two teenaged daughters, his ex-wife and her grandmother – during the weekend after Thanksgiving. Kahler’s young son was at the scene but ran out the back door and was not physically harmed. When Kahler’s case went to trial, an expert testified… Read More

This morning the Supreme Court issued more orders from last week’s private conference – the first regularly scheduled conference since the end of June. As expected, the justices did not add any more cases to their merits docket for the term, but they did deny review in over 1,000 cases. One of the most closely… Read More

The Supreme Court was already scheduled to take on a range of high-profile and potentially controversial issues in the next few months, including federal protection for LGBT employees, the Trump administration’s decision to end the program known as DACA, and gun rights. This morning the Supreme Court’s new term, which starts next Monday, became even… Read More

Next week the justices will return to the bench for the first time since the end of June. The new term is already full of interesting cases, including the very first one on Monday, October 7: Kahler v. Kansas, in which the Supreme Court will consider whether the Constitution allows a state to abolish the… Read More

For over a century, a criminal defendant in Louisiana (except in capital cases) could be convicted without a unanimous verdict from the jury. In 2018, the state’s voters repealed the non-unanimity rule, leaving Oregon as the only state in the nation that does not require a unanimous verdict. However, the change to Louisiana law only… Read More

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution of Robert Sparks, who has been sentenced to die by lethal injection in Texas for the brutal triple murder of his wife and two stepsons. There were no recorded dissents from tonight’s order, which denied both Sparks’ petition for review of the lower court’s ruling against… Read More

For residents of Fort Lee, New Jersey, the first day of school in September 2013 was a memorable one – and not in a good way. The traffic patterns on the George Washington Bridge, which crosses the Hudson River into New York at Fort Lee, had been abruptly altered, so that only one lane (instead… Read More

Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri’s policy of excluding churches from a program to provide grants to resurface playgrounds violated the Constitution. In a footnote in their opinion in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, the justices emphasized that their decision was limited to the facts before them and did “not address religious… Read More

The Supreme Court issued its calendar for the December sitting today. The justices are scheduled to kick off the sitting, which begins on Monday, December 2, with the oral argument in the challenge to New York City’s ban on transporting guns outside the city’s limits. But it’s not clear that the oral argument will actually… Read More