The Supreme Court is accustomed to having the last word on matters of constitutional interpretation. But in the application of First Amendment free speech principles to restrictions on corporate campaign spending, the Montana Supreme Court invoked one of the lessons from first-year law school – that facts matter – to uphold state restrictions on independent corporate spending in elections. Now, that court’s December 2011 decision appears to have set the Montana court on a collision course with the U.S. Supreme Court, which will soon decide whether (and how) it will review the ruling.
In January 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations and labor unions have a First Amendment right to engage in independent spending to influence elections. By a vote of five to four, the Justices overturned their own precedents and struck down a portion of federal election law that prohibited corporations and labor unions from spending their own funds directly to urge support for political candidates.
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Posted in Citizens United v. FEC, American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock, Featured, SCOTUS for law students
Coverage of the Court yesterday was dominated by the news that, earlier this month, Justice Breyer was the victim of a break-in at his Georgetown home. Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News reports on the story, as do Bill Mears of CNN, the New York Times, Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger of The Washington Post, James Vicini of Reuters, Fox News, and the ABA Journal.
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Posted in Everything Else
The petition of the day is:
Abdur’Rahman v. Colson
Note: Goldstein & Russell, P.C. represents the petitioner in this case.
Docket: 11-1215
Issue(s): (1) When is “cumulative error” a legally permitted basis for relief on federal habeas corpus; (2) is a prosecutor’s suppression of material exculpatory evidence excused whenever the defendant was aware of the facts contained therein, notwithstanding that the suppression prevented the defense from presenting the evidence of those facts to the jury; and (3) is defense counsel’s failure to investigate evidence that has some negative characteristics categorically immune from a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel?
Certiorari stage documents:
Posted in Abdur’Rahman v. Colson, Cases in the Pipeline
John Elwood reviews Monday’s relisted and held cases.
Monday was a big day. Facebook raised the price range of its IPO to $34-38 a share, up from $28-35; in a related story, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was buying Greece, Spain and Portugal with change he found under his sofa cushions, thus resolving the Euro Zone crisis; and, in somewhat less momentous news, the Supreme Court loosed a slew of new relists.
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Posted in Cases in the Pipeline
Coverage of Monday’s decision in Hall v. United States continued yesterday. Writing for this blog, Ronald Mann argued that the case, in which the Court held that tax liability incurred from the post-petition sale of a family farm is not dischargeable under Chapter 12 of the Bankruptcy Code, is “emblematic of the Court’s long-standing skepticism of the Bankruptcy Code as an important institution for mitigating the long-term costs of financial distress.”
Other coverage focuses on campaign finance, after Jeffrey Toobin’s recent story for the New Yorker on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. At Slate, Rick Hasen calls on Justice Souter to release the unpublished dissent he wrote before the case was held over for re-argument after his retirement in 2009. At Mother Jones, Gavin Aronsen profiles four pending campaign finance cases and assesses their prospects for rolling back Citizens United. In another story at Slate, Rick Hasen discusses one of those cases, Van Hollen v. Federal Election Commission, in which a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit refused to stay a district court decision requiring tax-exempt organizations that run election-related ads to disclose their donors. Hasen explains why the Court “might well agree to stay the ruling through the November elections,” in spite of its consistent support for disclosure requirements.
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Posted in Round-up
The petition of the day is:
Hepting v. AT&T Corp.
Docket: 11-1200
Issue(s): (1) In the case of a federal statutory claim, whether Congress may grant the Attorney General the power to choose which of two inconsistent statutory standards should govern the claim; (2) in the case of a state-law claim, whether Congress may grant the Attorney General the power to choose whether the state law governing the claim should be preempted by federal law; (3) in the case of a federal constitutional claim, whether Congress may grant the Attorney General the power to choose whether to exclude the claim from the jurisdiction of the federal and state courts; and (4) even if Congress may grant the Attorney General the powers described in Questions One, Two, and Three, whether Congress provided an intelligible principle limiting the Executive’s discretion in exercising those powers.
Certiorari stage documents:
Posted in Hepting v. AT&T Corp., Cases in the Pipeline
Monday’s decision in Hall v. United States is emblematic of the Court’s long-standing skepticism of the Bankruptcy Code as an important institution for mitigating the long-term costs of financial distress. As a jurisprudential matter, the case is a classic conflict of wholly separate worlds: the world of the IRS and the Internal Revenue Code on the one hand, and the world of financial distress and the Bankruptcy Code on the other. Each world has its own title of the United States Code (Title 26 for tax and Title 11 for bankruptcy), and each has its own set of institutions, legal experts, and – most importantly – foundational habits of mind and practice.
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Posted in Hall v. U.S., Featured, Merits Cases
Coverage of Monday’s opinions and orders continued yesterday. At JURIST, Julia Zebley summarizes Monday’s decision in Hall v. United States, in which the Court held that the federal income tax liability resulting from petitioners’ post-petition farm sale is not incurred by the estate under Section 503(b) of the Bankruptcy Code and thus is neither collectible nor dischargeable in the Chapter 12 plan. Also at JURIST, Michael Haggerson reports on Monday’s denial of cert. in a case challenging the lack of voting rights for Puerto Ricans in U.S. presidential elections. And at the Wall Street Journal blog Bankruptcy Beat, Jacqueline Palank reports that the Court “won’t review the conviction of Tom Petters, whose business empire once encompassed Polaroid and Sun County Airlines before his arrest on charges that he ran a massive Ponzi scheme.”
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Posted in Round-up
Analysis
For most of the past four years, the volunteer lawyers who are helping Guantanamo Bay detainees use their constitutional right of access to U.S. courts have faced a dilemma: they assumed that, at some point, the Supreme Court would again get interested in those cases, but they had no idea what it would take to get the Justices involved again. They persuaded the Court just once in those years to grant a case — a highly unusual one – but that case went away without any new guidance on where the Court stands.
Last Term, the lawyers failed every time as they tried repeatedly to fathom what might catch the Justices’ attention; they had what they regarded as solid issues, but no case advanced. This Term, they are trying again — seven more times, so far. But, among those seven, they have Latif v. Obama, and that may be their best chance. Indeed, if that one fails, too, it is hard to imagine the Court taking any Guantanamo captive’s case.
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Posted in Latif v. Obama, Analysis, Cases in the Pipeline, Detainee Litigation, Featured
At its May 17, 2012 Conference, the Court will consider such issues as the presumption of accuracy of intelligence reports in Guantanamo habeas decisions, standing to challenge the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the standard of federal habeas review for state court factual determinations, and the burden of proof for affirmative defenses in a criminal case. This edition of “Petitions to watch” features petitions raising issues that Tom has determined to have a reasonable chance of being granted, although we post them here without consideration of whether they present appropriate vehicles in which to decide those issues.
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Posted in Cases in the Pipeline
