In 1998, petitioner Carman Deck was convicted of, inter alia, two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death. After his convictions and sentence were affirmed on direct appeal, Deck sought state post-conviction relief on the ground that his trial counsel had been ineffective at sentencing. In 2002, the Missouri Supreme Court agreed and vacated his sentence.

Deck’s resentencing proceedings began in 2003. On the first day of those proceedings, Deck was led into the courtroom wearing legirons and handcuffed to a belly chain. Contending that the restraints were prejudicial, Deck’s counsel immediately objected and offered a variety of alternatives to the use of visible restraints, but his objections were overruled. At sentencing, the state presented evidence to support its contention that aggravating factors were present, while Deck presented mitigating evidence. The jury again imposed a death sentence, and Deck again appealed, arguing this time that the restraints were unconstitutional. The Missouri Supreme Court rejected his appeal, concluding that the trial court has the discretion to impose security measures to preserve order and security in the courtroom; that the record supported the use of the restraints; and that, in any event, Deck was not prejudiced by the use of the restraints.

The Court granted certiorari, and tomorrow it will consider whether the restraints violated Deck’s Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights and, if so, whether the state must show that the error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.

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This is a followup to the Supreme Court’s rulings on June 28, 2004, in Rumsfeld v. Padilla and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

A federal judge in South Carolina, rejecting President Bush’s broadest claims of war powers, on Monday ordered the release of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who has been held for 33 months as an “enemy combatant.” U.S. District Judge Henry F. Floyd also ruled, however, that the federal government could avoid releasing Padilla if it filed criminal charges against him, or acted to hold him as “a material witness.” Judge Floyd’s 23-page ruling can be found here..

The power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, Judge Floyd ruled, “belongs solely to Congress,” under the Constitution. “Since Congress has not acted to suspend the writ, and neither the President nor this Court have the authority to do so,” Padilla must be released. “It is true that there may be times during which it is necessary to give the Executive Branch greater power than at other times. Such a granting of power, however, is in the province of the legislature and no one else — not the Court and not the President…Simply stated, this is a law enforcement matter, not a military matter.”

This marks the second time that a federal court has found that President Bush lacked constitutional authority to hold a U.S. citizen as an “enemy combatant” for an indefinite period, without legal rights and without any criminal charges filed. The Second Circuit did so in 2003 in an earlier phase of Padilla’s case, but that ruling was set aside when the Supreme Court ruled last June that Padilla had filed his habeas challenge in the wrong court. The case was shifted to South Carolina, and Padilla filed a new habeas petition. He is being held in Charleston, S.C., in a U.S. Naval brig.

Judge Floyd, nominated to U.S. District Court by President Bush in May 2003, has been on the bench since September of that year. His ruling Monday was issued in Spartanburg, S.C.

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Tuesday, in the consolidated argument of Exxon Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. and Ortega v. Star-Kist Foods, Inc., the Court will take another swing at deciding whether 28 U.S.C. § 1367 (the supplemental jurisdiction statute) allows a federal court with diversity jurisdiction over a claim exceeding the jurisdictional amount to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over related claims that do not. The circuits are deeply divided over the issue, and the Supreme Court whiffed on its prior attempt to resolve it, dividing equally (and affirming without opinion) in the 2000 case of Free v. Abbott Laboratories.

The consolidated cases present two different (and possibly relevant) contexts. In Exxon Corp., a putative class alleges that Exxon breached its dealers’ agreement. The Court is asked to decide whether each class member must individually satisfy the amount-in-controversy. In Ortega, a child injured while opening a can of tuna seeks to join her claims for physical and emotional injuries with her family’s claims for emotional damages and medical expenses. The Court must answer the same question in the context of normal joinder.

Although the First Circuit in Ortega suggested that the distinction between class actions and normal joinder might be relevant, other circuits disagree. At the very least, the consolidated cases will provide the Court with two more pitches with which to get a hit on the supplemental jurisdiction question. Hopefully, the Court will connect on at least one of these swings; otherwise, there will be no joy in civil procedure-ville for the mighty Supreme Court will have struck out.

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On Sunday The L.A. Times had this editorial piece on Chief Justice Rehnquist’s legacy.

UPI’s Michael Kirkland has this article in The Washington Times discussing opinions and oral arguments from last week.

News on today’s oral arguments in Spector v. Norwegian Cruise Line [disclosure: Goldstein & Howe, P.C. for petitioners]:
Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal;
Warren Richey of The Christian Science Monitor;
Nina Totenberg of NPR; and
Patti Waldmeir in Financial Times.

Here is today’s Washington Post Supreme Court Calendar.

The Washington Post has this editorial piece on oral arguments, heard last week, in Kelo v. New London.

News on Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County v. A.C.L.U. of Kentucky, both of which will be argued on Wednesday:
Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times;
Patty Reinert of The Houston Chronicle;
and this opinion piece in The Dallas Morning News.

The AP’s Alex Veiga has this article in USAToday on MGM v. Grokster, which will be argued on March 29.

The Supreme Court on Monday granted review of four cases, one on the free-speech rights of public employees, one on state taxes on gasoline sold by Indian tribes to their customers, and two on jurisdictional issues. The Court, once again, took no action on the dispute over the constitutionality of presidential appointments to federal judgeships during brief recesses of the Senate.

The new cases granted review are expected to be heard in October.

In the free speech case, Garcetti v. Ceballos (docket 04-473), the Court will define further the right of state and local government employees to First Amendment protection against retaliation when they speak out on issues of “public concern.” The lower courts have divided over the relationship between the topic the employee discusses and that individual’s work assignment.

The case involves a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, who sued his superiors, claiming that they demoted him and relocated him to punish him for protesting in an internal memorandum that a deputy sheriff had lied in an affidavit to support a search warrant in a pending case. The deputy ultimately shared the memo with defense lawyers, and testified at a hearing on a motion challenging the search warrant.

The supervising prosecutors obtained summary judgment in the District Court, on the theory that Ceballos had prepared his memo as part of his normal duties, not “as a citizen,” and thus his speech was not protected by the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit overturned the summary judgment, declaring that a public employee’s work-related speech lacks constitutional protection only when the substance of the speech “would be of no relevance to the public’s evaluation of the performance of governmental agencies.” Former DA Gil Garcetti’s petition for review contends that this deepens a conflict among the Circuit Courts on the need to show that on-the-job expression was engaged in as citizen-speech.

In the tax case, Richards v. Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation (04-631), the Court faces the authority of states to impose a gasoline levy on distributors and importers, when the fuel is received outside of an Indian reservation but the fuel later is sold by a tribe to consumers. Thirteen states supported the appeal by Kansas taxing officials, arguing that the Tenth Circuit decision at issue undermined a “bright-line rule” permitting state taxation on non-Indians unless expressly barred by federal law.

In Lincoln Property Co. v. Roche (04-712), the Court will rule on the definition of “real party in interest” in deciding whether there is complete diversity among the parties so that a case may proceed in federal, not state, court. The case tests whether a party not named in the lawsuit can be considered a party in order to destroy complete diversity and thus nullify federal jurisdiction.

And, in Unitherm Food Systems v. Swift-Eckrich (04-597), the issue is whether a federal appeals court may review the sufficiency of evidence in a civil jury case where the party seeking to appeal had made a motion for judgment as a matter of law before the case went to the jury, but did not later renew that motion and did not move for a new trial. The Court rewrote the question it will be answering. The case grows out of an antitrust and patent dispute in the food processing industry. Swift-Eckrich is a ConAgra company.

The Court had again considered at its Friday Conference three appeals challenging President Bush’s recess appointment of Circuit Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., to the 11th Circuit. But, no action was taken on any of the three on Monday. The Court did act on one additional case that had challenged Pryor’s appointment — an appeal from the 11th Circuit by Gary Michael Senn (Senn v. U.S., 04-7175), but the judgment in that case was vacated for further review by the Circuit Court under U.S. v. Booker — the Sentencing Guidelines decision.

Continuing to return other federal Sentencing Guidelines cases to the lower courts for new reviews in the wake of Booker, the Court disposed of 38 additional petitions for review, in addition to Senn’s.

Here is today’s Order List. The Court granted certiorari in four cases and asked for the SG’s views in another. Still no word on the four petitions challenging the constitutionality of the recess appointment of Judge Pryor.

The grants are:

No. 04-473, Garcetti v. Ceballos

No. 04-597, Unitherm Food Systems v. Swift-Eckrich, Inc. (limited to the question whether, and to what extent, a court of appeals may review the sufficiency of evidence supporting a civil jury verdict where the party requesting review made a motion for judgment as a matter of law under Rule 50(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure before submission of the case to the jury, but neither renewed that motion under Rule 50(b) after the jury’s verdict, nor moved for a new trial under Rule 59)

No. 04-631, Richards v. Priarie Band Potawatomi Nation

and

No. 04-712, Lincoln Proeprty Co. v. Roche.

The Court invited the Acting Solicitor General to file a brief expressing the views of the United States in No. 04-607, Laboratory Corp. of America v. Metabolite Laboratories, on the following question: “Respondent’s patent claims a method for detecting a form of vitamin B deficiency, which focuses upon a correlation in the human body between elevated levels of certain amino acids and deficient levels of vitamin B. The method consists of the following: First, measure the level of the relevant amino acids using any device, whether the device is, or is not, patented; second, notice whether the amino acid level is elevated and, if so, conclude that a vitamin B deficiency exists. Is the patent invalid because one cannot patent “laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas”? Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175, 185 (1981).”

The Court will be issuing opinions in one or more argued cases both tomorrow and Wednesday. There’ll be an Order List today.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Pace v. DiGuglielmo. The Court is being asked whether an untimely state post-conviction habeas petition may be “properly filed” under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which requires habeas corpus petitions to be filed within one year of the final conviction appeal at the state level. The clock on this one-year requirement is paused when a “properly filed” state post-conviction petition is pending in the state courts.

Petitioner John Pace is challenging his 1985 conviction for second-degree murder. Pace claims that his counsel led him to believe that if he pleaded guilty he would be sentenced to a 10- to 15-year prison term. Instead he received a life sentence without parole.

Though Pace did not file a direct appeal, he did file a pro se petition under the Pennsylvania Post Conviction Hearing Act, claiming both ineffective assistance from trial counsel and trial court error. The petition for state post-conviction relief was denied in 1992. After this first request, the Pennsylvania legislature replaced the state’s Post Conviction Hearing Act with the Pennsylvania Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA), and subsequently amended the PCRA to include, inter alia, time limits in an effort to prevent the filing of repetitive petitions. Like AEDPA, the PCRA - which took effect on January 16, 1996 - like its federal counterpoint, requires that habeas petitions be filed within one year of the date on which a prisoner’s conviction becomes final. For prisoners, like Pace, whose convictions became final before the legislation became effective, the first petition had to be filed within a year of the PCRA’s effective date.

On November 27, 1996, Pace filed a second request for collateral relief - this time under the amended PCRA - repeating his ineffective assistance of counsel claim. The Court of Common Pleas denied Pace’s request based on the merits of the case, without making any determination about whether his petition was timely or not. Pace appealed his case to the Pennsylvania Superior Court, which dismissed the request as untimely in December 1998, citing two state cases where the trial-level court mistakenly acted on an untimely post-conviction relief petition.

Next, having exhausted state-post conviction relief, Pace filed a habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in December 1999 - more than two-and-a-half years after the end of AEDPA’s one-year “grace period” for prisoners whose convictions became final before the AEDPA’s effective date. Pace argues that he could not have filed the petition within the first year of enactment because the court would have refused to hear it because he had not exhausted his remedies in state court.

The question then, is whether his untimely state post-conviction petition, which had been pending in Pennsylvania when the federal clock ran out, would be considered “properly filed” for purposes of the AEDPA’s one-year statute of limitations.

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I’m arguing this case tomorrow at the Court. The question is the extent to which Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act applies to cruise ships, and foreign-flagged cruise ships in particular. Title III is the statutory provision forbidding discrimination in public accommodations and specified forms of public transportation. We are litigating the case with the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.

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Tom Perrotta has this article in New York Law Journal discussing the Court’s opinions in Blakely and Booker.

Ann Woolner has this opinion piece in Bloomberg on Gonzales v. Oregon, in which the Court granted cert. on Tuesday.

The Vacaville Reporter has this opinion piece on the Court’s decision in Johnson v. California. Bill Fancher of The Conservative Voice has this opinion piece on the same decision.

Interesting observations on the Kelo case from Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, and from Professors Peter Byrne and Richard Epstein, debating over at Legal Affairs. Lithwick and Byrne largely confirm my impression of the oral argument, and Byrne and Epstein provide some interesting reactions to the suggestions of several Justices (led by Justice Kennedy) that if the Court is to reconsider its doctrine in any respect, it ought to be with respect to the calculation of what compensation is “just,” rather than to the notion of “public use.”

Here are brief summaries of the 11 cases the Supreme Court will hear in the weeks of April 18 and April 25. The calendar can be found here. The Court granted review of these cases on January 7 or 14. These will be the final arguments of the Term, unless an emergency case arises.

Monday, April 18
04-603 – Grable & Sons Metal Products v. Darue Engineering – scope of right to transfer a quiet title action from state to federal court.
04-6964 – Johnson v. California – proof needed to satisfy the first step in showing that peremptory challenges to potential jurors in a criminal case were based on racial bias

Tuesday, April 19
04-637 – Bradshaw v. Stumpf – test for voluntariness of guilty plea; also, obligation to vacate guilty plea if a later prosecution of another individual for a role in the crime produces inconsistent evidence.
04-563 – Mayle v. Felix – application of one-year habeas filing deadline when the state inmate amends a petition to include a new claim

Wednesday, April 20
03-1237 – Merck KGaA v. Integra Lifesciences – clarification of 1984 federal law giving drug researchers a “safe harbor” against patent infringement claims
04-169 – Graham County Water District v. U.S. – definition of filing deadline for claims under the False Claims Act for retaliatory discharge

Monday, April 25
03-10198 – Halbert v. Michigan — constitutionality of Michigan procedure of denying a free lawyer to aid a poor individual who has pleaded guilty but wants to appeal. (Same issue as in Kowalski v. 26th Judicial Circuit Court, 03-407, dismissed in December for lack of standing)
04-6432 – Gonzalez v. Crosby – right of prison inmates to seek to reopen their cases in federal court by filing Rule 60-b motions without being barred for second effort to obtain habeas relief

Tuesday, April 26
Consolidated cases, one hour: 03-1230 – American Trucking Associations v. Michigan Public Service Commission, and 03-1234 – Mid-Con Freight Systems v. Michigan Public Service Commission – constitutionality of state fee on trucks operating on state roads.
04-514 – Bell v. Thompson – authority of federal appeals court to withdraw an opinion dismissing a habeas petition six months after the mandate was to have been issued

Wednesday, April 27
04-368 – Arthur Andersen LLP v. U.S. – challenge, in case growing out of Enron scandal, to conviction for persuading employees to destroy documents to disrupt a federal securities investigation

News on the Court’s opinion, issued yesterday, in No. 03-636, Johnson v. California:
Joan Biskupic of USAToday;
Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle;
Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times;
Charles Lane of The Washington Post;
Tony Mauro of Legal Times;
Michael McGough of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette;
David Savage and Paige Austin on NPR’s Legal Affairs;
David G. Savage and Jenifer Warren of The L.A. Times; and
the AP’s Hope Yen in The Boston Globe.

Marci Hamilton has this essay on findlaw.com discussing the oral argument in Kelo v. New London.

Marya Lucas of Legal Times has this article on some of the cases the Justices will consider at this Friday’s conference, including specifically Roche v. Lincoln Property Co.

Doug Berman has this post commenting on a possible theme of the Rehnquist Court.

The Court on Tuesday announced its decision in Smith v. Massachusetts, vacating a state conviction on Double Jeopardy grounds where the judge reversed a midtrial ruling of insufficiency of the evidence on one count. The case turned on the relatively narrow issue of whether a state rule allowing that ruling is framed to give rise to a reasonable expectation of finality; the majority expressly noted that states could ensure a different outcome simply by expressly “rendering midtrial acquittals nonfinal.” The 5-4 decision also marked the first time that Justices Stevens, Scalia, O’Connor, Souter, and Thomas have formed a five-justice majority. (Thanks to Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy and Anton Metlitsky for pointing this out.)

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As Tom previously noted, we filed a brief in opposition to certiorari today in No. 04-856, City of Evanston v. Franklin.

The case arises against the backdrop of a series of Supreme Court cases – including Garrity v. New Jersey (1967), Gardner v. Broderick (1968), and Lefkowitz v. Cunningham (1977) – which established that (1) a government employer can compel its employees to answer questions relating to the performance of their official duties, but that (2) the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from using those answers against the employee in future criminal proceedings.

Respondent Franklin, an employee of the City of Evanston, Illinois, was arrested for possession of drugs while off duty. He was questioned about the episode and the charges by his boss, at a pre-termination disciplinary hearing, and at a grievance hearing. Franklin refused to answer the questions because of the pending criminal charges (which were later dropped). When he was fired, Franklin brought suit against the city for, inter alia, violating his right to due process.

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CNN.com has this article on the Court’s opinion, issued today, in No. 03-636, Johnson v. California.

News on No. 04-623, Gonzales v. Oregon, the Death With Dignity Act case, in which the Court granted cert. yesterday:
Joan Biskupic of USAToday;
Jan Crawford Greenburg of The Chicago Tribune;
Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times;
Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder;
Charles Lane of The Washington Post;
Tony Mauro and Marya Lucas of Legal Times;
David Savage of The L.A. Times;
Brad Knickerbocker of The Christian Science Monitor;
the AP’s Typh Tucker in The Boston Globe;
Reuters’ James Vicini in The Boston Globe; and
the AP’s Hope Yen in The Boston Globe.

News on yesterday’s oral arguments in Kelo v. City of New London:
Dan Ackman of Forbes;
Laurie Asseo of Bloomberg;
Joan Biskupic of USAToday;
Reuters’ Deborah Charles in The Boston Globe;
Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times;
Charles Lane of The Washington Post;
Dahlia Lithwick of Slate;
Tony Mauro of Legal Times;
Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe; and
the AP’s Pete Yost in The Boston Globe.

Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe has this article on the Court’s decisions yesterday in Stewart v. Dutra Construction and Smith v. Massachusetts, both of which originated in the Boston area.

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post has this article on the absences of both Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Stevens from yesterday’s oral arguments.

Tim Craig and Miranda Spivack of The Washington Post have this article on No. 04-698, Schaffer v. Weast, in which the the Court granted cert. yesterday.

Cliff Sloan has this article in Newsweek entitled “A Final Chapter for the Chief Justice?”

Here is The Washington Post’s Supreme Court Calendar for today, Wednesday, February 23, 2005.

The L.A. Times has this AP article on No. 04-967, McCorvey v. Hill, in which the Court yesterday rejected an effort by Norma McCorvey – a.k.a. “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade fame – to re-open her case to account for new evidence.

The Boston Globe has this AP article on No. 04-368, Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States, which will be argued on April 27.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that racial segregation of prison inmates, in their cells and elsewhere in prison operations, is a form of racial classification that must be judged by a rigorous constitutional standard: strict scrutiny. The Court did not decide, however, whether the California prison policy specifically at issue failed to satisfy that standard; it left that question for review in lower courts.

The vote was 5-3, with Chief Justice Rehnquist not participating. The decision, announced in an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, was the only opinion of the day. Justice John Paul Stevens presided in the Chief Justice’s absence.

Justice Stevens dissented from the prison decision, arguing that the Court should have gone ahead now and struck down the policy of routinely segregation all new or transferred prison inmates in their cell assignments for the initial 60 days. Justice Clarence Thomas, in a separate dissent joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, argued that the Court should have deferred to prison officials’ discretion in managing their inmate populations. “The Constitution has always demanded less within the prison walls,” Thomas wrote.

The only segregation directly at issue in the case was the assignment of inmates to cells by race, upon arrival at a prison. But language in the opinion made it clear that it would probably apply to any form of racial classification in the prison context. “It is not readily apparent,” the majority said, “why, if segregation in reception centers is justified, segregation in the dining halls, yards, and general housing areas is not also permissible.”

The Court noted that the federal prison system and “virtually all other states” are managed “without reliance on racial segregation.”

Three of the five Justices who were part of the majority in the case said in a separate opinion that they accepted the strict scrutiny standard when racial segregation in prison was at issue, but would not necessarily apply that standard to other forms of racial classification if they were designed “to hasten the day when entrenched discrimination and its after-effects” have been wiped out — a suggestion that they would be more tolerant of the use of race to support “affirmative action.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that separate opinion, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter. Their votes, however, supported the O’Connor approach to the California prison case.

O’Connor’s opinion for the majority relied in part upon a 1968 decision, in Lee v. Washington, in which a divided Court upheld a lower court ruling sriking down a racial segregation policy in Alabama prisons. “We did not relax the standard of review for racial classifications in prison in Lee, and we refuse to do so today,” O’Connor said.

“By perpetuating the notion that race matters, racial segregation of inmates may exacerbate the very patterns of violence that it is said to counteract,” the majority said. “In the prison context, when the government’s power is at its apex, we think that searching judicial review of racial classifications is necessary to guard against invidious discrimination.”

O’Connor said that the strict scrutiny standard “does not preclude the ability of prison officials to address the compelling interest in prison safety. Prison administrators, however, will have to demonstrate that any race-based policies are narrowly tailored to that end.” She remarked that “prisons are dangerous places, and the special circumstances they present may justify racial classifications in some contexts.”

The Court reversed a Ninth Circuit decision allowing the cell segregation policy, deferring to prison officials’ discretion under the authority of the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in Turner v. Safley. The Court noted that “we have never applied Turner to racial classifications. Turner itself did not involve any racial classification, and it cast no doubt on Lee.”

Wednesday’s ruling came in the case of Johnson v. California (docket 03-636).

The Court will hear arguments today in Orff v. United States and Exxon Mobil v. Saudi Basic. You can read detailed summaries of these cases in yesterday’s posts by SCOTUSBlog contributors Neel Sukhatme (Orff) and Stephen Shackelford (Exxon Mobil).

Today, we’re filing this brief in opposition to certiorari in No. 04-856, City of Evanston v. Franklin, with the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. The credit for the work goes to Pam Karlan and the team of students on the case.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the City’s counsel in Kelo told the Court he was going to close with four words, but then his time expired and they remained a mystery. A helpful email correspondent says that the counsel said to the press outside the Court after argument that the words were “federalism, boundaries, discretion, and precedent.” Ok, so maybe it wasn’t such a loss that he didn’t get that last line out.

The National Council on Disability has drafted this report on No. 03-1388, Spector v. Norwegian Cruise Line (in which we represent the petitioners), and its implications for persons with disabilities.

The case will be argued on Monday, February 28.

As I mentioned earlier, we’re joint counsel to the respondents in this case. Here is the brief (and appendix) for the private respondents. We also represent the governmental respondents, but we were much less involved in their brief.

With thanks to Doug Ross for the head’s up, here is the April calendar.

Keep your eyes out for No. 04-607, Laboratory Corp. of Am. v. Metabolite Labs. This case is about to be relisted for the fourth time. The patent question in the case (plus the fact that the record hasn’t been requested) suggests that a dissent from the denial of cert. is more likely here than a summary reversal.

Georgetown University Law Center will be hosting a Spector v. Norwegian Cruise Line Ltd. panel discussion on March 1. Please see this website for more information. [Disclaimer: Goldstein & Howe, P.C. is counsel for the petitioners.]