Today’s opinion by Justice Ginsburg in New Jersey v. Delaware (Orig. 134) is now available here. Justice Stevens filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. Justice Scalia filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Alito joined. Justice Breyer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
A copy of today’s orders list – including grants of certiorari in two cases — is now available here. As they become available, all available certiorari-stage filings will be posted after the jump.
FURTHER UPDATED 11:45 a.m.
This update includes, in the concluding paragraphs of the post, a report on an order issued on Sunday by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in a California parole case.
The Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear the Justice Department appeal seeking to restore the FBI’s full authority to search the offices of members of Congress under investigation for crime. The denial of review came as the Court agreed to hear two new cases — one on city government power to limit the kinds of monuments placed in city parks. The other case tests state power to block local governments from deducting fees from their workers’ paychecks to finance political activities.
In the only decision on the merits Monday, the Court ruled that Delaware and New Jersey share the legal authority to control construction of riverside projects along the Delaware River. It thus rejected New Jersey’s claim to exclusive jurisdiction over projects that jut out from New Jersey’s shore into the river. The decision in New Jersey v. Delaware (134 Original) upheld most of a recommendation by a Special Master that the Court rule that the two states shared regulatory authority over such projects. The dispute arose over plans to build a large natural gas loading facility for supertankers along the Delaware River. The vote was 6-2, with Justice John Paul Stevens in the majority on part of the case and in dissent on another part. Justice Stephen G. Breyer did not take part. The main opinion was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The Court’s denial of review in U.S. v. Rayburn House Office Building Room 2113 (07-8160) left intact a ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court that gives members of the House and Senate some protection under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause against criminal searches — even with a warrant — of their legislative offices. The specific search at issue involved the office of Rep. William Jefferson, Louisiana Democrat, who has since been charged with bribery and other federal crimes. The Justice Department appeal argued that the Circuit Court’s decision would seriously hamper probes of corruption and criminal conduct by lawmakers. The congressman’s trial in federal court in Alexandria, VA, has been delayed while he pursues an appeal in the Fourth Circuit Court on a pre-trial issue.
The newly granted case on monuments on public property — Pleasant Grove City v. Summum (06-665) — will return the Court to the thorny issue of government control of expressive displays in city parks and other public places. The case grows out of a dispute between a city in Utah and a religious sect, Summum, that sought to place in a city park — along with other monuments, including one dedicated to the Ten Commandments — a monument to the tenets of Summum’s faith, the “Seven Aphorisms.”
The other granted case, Ysura v. Pocatello Education Association (07-869), tests a Ninth Circuit Court ruling that the First Amendment bars the Idaho legislature from denying payroll deductions by local governments for political activities. The Idaho law at issue barred payroll deductions to pay for political activities by labor unions. The law was challenged by labor unions representing workers for school districts, cities and counties in Idaho.
The two new cases will be argued in the Term starting Oct. 6.
At 10 a.m., the Court is expected to release one or more opinions, as well as orders from the Justices’ private conference last Friday. We will post copies of both as soon as they become available.
No oral arguments are scheduled this week.
On Monday, the Court is expected to release one or more opinions, as well as orders from the Justices’ private conference last Friday.
No petitioners’ merits briefs are due this week. The respondent’s merits brief is due Friday in Meacham v. Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (06-1505). (Link directs to case page on SCOTUSwiki.)
The Justices are scheduled to hold a private conference at 10 a.m. If any orders are released this afternoon, we will post them promptly. To view our list of petitions to watch at today’s conference, click here.
This post is part of our Discussion Board regarding the Court’s decision in Medellin v. Texas. The following entry is by Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. He filed an amicus brief in support of Texas, on behalf of that organization and Randy and Sandra Ertman. This entry is cross-posted at the blog “Crime & Consequences” here.
Despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Supreme Court’s decision in Medellin v. Texas, the holding is not all that remarkable. It has long been established that not all treaties are self-executing, and the Court held that the ones at issue here are not based on their own language. Where adherence to a treaty is contrary to a statute, the President cannot override the statute unilaterally, but legislation is required. Far from making America a rogue nation, placement of the responsibility for treaty compliance in the political branches and not the judiciary is quite common in the world.
So the ball is squarely in Congress’s court. The United States, of course, should live up to its treaty commitments. What would a congressional implementation of International Court of Justice’s decision in Avena look like? It should go as far as our treaty obligations require and not a nanometer further. Read the rest of this entry »
As we turn to the Term’s final month of arguments, I thought I would write a short update on the cases in which we’re involved.
Akin (either alone or with the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic) is currently counsel to a party in twelve merits cases.
The Akin-only cases are Lopez-Torres (NY elections; successfully argued by N.Y. partner Andy Rossman); Clintwood Elkhorn (Export Clause; Pattie Millett argued - pending); Heller (gun rights; co-counsel to the District of Columbia, and Walter Dellinger argued - pending); and APCC Services (standing; we are lead counsel, and Carter Phillips will argue in April). We filed the cert. petition in three of those cases; in the fourth, cert was granted over our opposition.
Among the cases we are litigating with the Stanford Clinic for this Term, I am principally responsible for Moore (4th Amendment; I argued - pending). Other instructors have the lead role in Riley (voting rights; Pam Karlan argued - pending); Burgess (drug sentencing; Jeff Fisher argued - pending); Crawford (voting rights; co-counsel to the petitioners - pending); and Greenlaw (appellate procedure; Amy Howe will argue in April).
The Stanford Clinic separately represents a party in two other merits cases this Term in which Akin is not participating: Meacham (ADEA; Kevin Russell will argue in April); and Kennedy (death penalty; Jeff Fisher will argue in April).
We have three additional merits cases for next Term that we are litigating with the Clinic: Jimenez (AEDPA procedure; I will argue); Herring (4th Amendment); and Melendez-Diaz (Confrontation).
(The case names above link to their respective pages on SCOTUSwiki, which include all filings.)
We have a variety of cert. petitions pending. In commercial cases, Akin represents the petitioners in Progress Energy (07-539) (filings here) (FMLA; pending before the Solicitor General); Centerior (07-961) (petition here) (federal jurisdiction; awaiting brief in opposition); Tyson Foods (07-1014) (petitioner here) (FLSA; awaiting brief in opposition); and Radian Guaranty (07-834) (Fair Credit Reporting Act; pending).
In non-commercial cases, with the Stanford Clinic, we represent the petitioners in Cone (07-1114) (petition here) (death penalty; awaiting brief in opposition) and Baker (07-1082) (petition here) (civil rights pleading; awaiting brief in opposition). Two additional petitions are in the late stages of drafting.
Without Akin’s involvement, the Stanford Clinic separately represents the respondent in Hulteen (filings here) (pregnancy discrimination; pending before the Solicitor General).
We also represent a putative intervenor (the Catawba River Water Supply Project) in an original action, South Carolina v. North Carolina.
The Stanford Clinic has been very fortunate in assembling a merits docket. The Clinic currently has ten active merits cases. All but one of those will be argued by one of the instructors, all five of whom will argue. The cases came to the Clinic in diverse ways: in five, we filed the cert petition; in two, review was granted over our opposition; and in three, we were brought in by the petitioner after cert was granted. The final category includes two cases (Burgess and Jimenez) in which the petitioners impressively got cert granted pro se.
The latest edition of “Petitions to Watch” features cases up for consideration at the Justices’ private conference of April 11. As always, the list reflects the petitions on the Court’s paid docket that Tom has deemed to have a reasonable chance of being granted. To access previous editions of Petitions to Watch, including the list for the upcoming conference of March 28, visit our archives here on SCOTUSwiki.
Issues raises in the current list of petitions include defendants’ rights to appeal competency determinations, courts’ jurisdiction to review denials of continuances in immigration proceedings, and immunity from civil liability for district attorney supervisors following wrongful convictions. For the full list of petitions on our watch list, continue reading after the jump.
No oral arguments are scheduled and no non-capital orders are expected to be issued from the Court today. If any orders are issued in pending cases, we will post them promptly.
A new edition of this Term’s StatPack is here. Note that we have not included a case list in this download, but the SCOTUSwiki case indices have been updated to reflect the latest opinions and grants; OT07 is here, and OT08 is here.
One additional item of curiosity this week: on Monday, the Court granted cert. in Pearson v. Callahan, which included the following directive: “In addition to the questions presented by the petition, the parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: ‘Whether the Court’s decision in Saucier v. Katz, 533 U. S. 194 (2001) should be overruled?’” One reader emailed us to ask an interesting question: when was the last time the Court sua sponte (i.e. on its own) ordered the parties to address specifically whether it should overrule one of its precedents?
Based on our searches of various databases, the last time this happened (and the only time in recent history) was 1991 in a case called Payne v. Tennessee. In an order reported at 498 U.S. 1080, the Court amended its grant of a few days earlier to add a question about overruling two of its then-recent capital case precedents, Booth v. Maryland and South Carolina v. Gathers. In its ultimate opinion, the Court did indeed overrule those two 5-4 decisions by a vote of 6-3, leading Justice Marshall to write a dissent noting that “Neither the law nor the facts supporting Booth and Gathers underwent any change in the last four years. Only the personnel of this Court did.”
The transcript of today’s argument in Indiana v. Edwards (07-208) is now available here.
The transcript of today’s argument in Florida Dept. of Revenue v. Piccadilly Cafeterias (07-312) is now available here.
With Justice Antonin Scalia energetically and repeatedly making the case for a simple rule, the Supreme Court on Wednesday showed a reluctance to add a new layer of complexity to criminal trials when a person with a significant mental defect wants to act as his own defense lawyer. The core issue in Indiana v. Edwards (07-208) is whether states are constitutionally free to require that accused individuals have a higher level of mental capacity to represent themselves than is required for them simply to be put on trial with a lawyer at their side. As the lawyer for the state pressed for a two-level standard, most of the Court reacted with skepticism, first, about how to define a workable two-level test, and, second, about how that would complicate actual trials. Underlying much of the oral argument was a deep perplexity over how to conduct fair trials for persons with sub-standard mental capacity.
Scalia would come to dominate the argument, as he took the somewhat heroic position that those who represent themselves “bring it on themselves” if they botch the job, but at the same time suggesting that, in cases of actual trial disruption by a defendant who was making “a farce” of the proceeding, the trial judge should be free to act to prohibit that. Some members of the Court worried about whether such intervention by a trial judge would come too late, after “the damage had been done,” as Justices Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter put it. But it was far from clear that the answer the majority of the Court would embrace was a brand new constitutional rule on mental competency to self-represent.
Indiana’s solicitor general, Thomas M. Fisher, from early in his presentation, appeared to have difficulty winning support for the specific higher-level competency standard he was proposing: self-representation can be denied, before trial, “where the defendant cannot communicate coherently.” Justice Scalia promptly labeled that “a really vague test,” and other Justices soon suggested that it might turn out to exclude self-representation by those who have speech impediments on language deficiencies. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested that what Indiana was arguing might lead to “more inefficiencies in the trial process.” And Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., expressed concern that a new rule on competency “is going to result in the denial of self-representation in a great number of cases.”
The Court, however, did not appear to be in agreement over when the trial judge would be allowed to make a finding that a person was not capable of defending himself: before trial, early in the trial, or after the proceedings had run for a time. While Justice Scalia vigorously objected to such a denial coming any time before trial, others — such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — indicated that, if pre-trial proceedings clearly showed an individual acting as his own lawyer would put on “gibberish” instead of any kind of real defense, a denial of self-representation might come then.
Kevin had this to say about yesterday’s argument in the consolidated cases of Munaf v. Geren (06-1666) and Geren v. Omar (07-394).
I wanted to add a few additional thoughts about the Munaf/Omar argument yesterday, specifically with respect to the jurisdictional question. As Lyle notes in his post, counsel for the detainees allowed himself to be whipsawed a bit by some of the Justices, but that reflects in part the great difficulty of the case – all the Justices seem to recognize that important lines have to be drawn in this case, different Justices seemed to indicate very different views about where those lines should be drawn (even among Justices whom one might ordinarily assume share the same basic outlook), and the text of the relevant statute isn’t very helpful in making the kinds of distinctions the Justices seem to feel must be drawn to balance the historic liberty-protecting office of the writ with the important interests in allowing the executive great leeway in a time and place of war.
To briefly reiterate, the detainees in this case are American citizens captured in
Both filed habeas petitions in the
On its face, the statute does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, between those detained or held in custody abroad or at home, between detention in the course of an armed conflict or detention during a period of tranquility, or between the various capacities in which the
Stanford student Anna Neill’s recap of oral argument in Republic of the Philippines v. Pimentel is now available on SCOTUSwiki. Read her latest entry here.
The Hall Street SCOTUSwiki page is now updated with Christian Davis’ entry on yesterday’s decision. Find it here. Christian is a law student at Georgetown University and was a summer associate at Akin in 2007.
At 10 a.m., the Court is scheduled to hear argument in Indiana v. Edwards (07-208) on whether defendants found competent to stand trial maintain a right to self-representation. Indiana Solicitor General Thomas M. Fisher and Michael R. Dreeben of the Solicitor General’s office will argue for the petitioner, and Mark T. Stancil of Washington, D.C., will argue for the respondent.
At 11 a.m., the Court is scheduled to hear argument in Florida Dept. of Revenue v. Piccadilly Cafeterias (07-312) on whether a state may tax a court-ordered transfer of property from a chapter 11 bankruptcy estate to a third-party purchaser of the bankrupt party’s assets. Florida Solicitor General Scott D. Makar will argue for the petitioner, and G. Eric Brunstad, Jr., of Hartford, Conn., will argue for the respondent.
Today is the birthday of retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who turns 78.
This post is part of our Discussion Board regarding the Court’s decision in Medellin v. Texas. The following entry is by Professor Ernie Young of Duke Law School. He filed an amicus brief in support of Texas, on behalf of Constitutional and International Law Scholars.
Having served as counsel of record for the Scholars’ Brief in support of Texas, I think this is a great day for the Constitution. I’ve posted a more extensive discussion of the Medellin opinions and their implications over at the Opinio Juris blog here. In this post, I’d like to make few additional points:
First, God bless Justice Stevens. Although his heart seemed to be with the dissenters in some respects, his vote was the only one standing in the way of the case turning on the Court’s familiar 5-4, left-right split. I think it would be extremely unfortunate to view issues concerning the relationships between domestic and international law and institutions in this way. After all, the next case may involve a NAFTA or WTO panel holding that domestic environmental laws violate international trade agreements.
The following post is part of a Discussion Board about today’s decision in Medellin v. Texas. This entry was written by Ricahrd Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation. He filed an amicus brief in support of Texas, on behalf of the parents of one of the murder victims and also on behalf of the Washington Legal Foundation.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of today’s Medellin decision was the Court’s professed willingness to defer to Congress when it comes to deciding which decisions of foreign tribunals are binding on U.S. courts. The majority stated that it would have been quite willing to be bound by the International Court of Justice’s determination of U.S. obligations under the Vienna Convention, if Congress had decreed that U.S. courts should be so bound.
That show of judicial humility is in contrast to comments made by several of the justices at oral arguments. Justices Kennedy and Scalia in particular seemed indignant at the suggestion that they could ever be required to abide by a judgment of the ICJ, especially because that judgment was based on an interpretation of the Vienna Convention that the Court had rejected in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon. (One of them invoked Marbury for the proposition that it is up to the Supreme Court to say what the law is.) But the Chief Justice’s opinion is a paean to judicial humility (particularly at pp. 18-20 of the Slip Opinion). Only the three dissenters would have allowed the courts to play a role in picking and choosing when judgments of the ICJ should be enforceable in U.S. courts. The Chief Justice said that the ICJ’s Avena judgment was not enforceable because Congress had indicated that such judgments are not judicially enforceable but indicated that U.S. courts are required to enforce any judgments that Congress says they are required to enforce regardless whether they disagree with the foreign tribunal’s reasoning.
Commentary
When several Justices of the Supreme Court tell an attorney they do not understand his argument, and they do so because the argument was, indeed, fundamentally confusing, the chances of winning may be significantly reduced. When Chicago lawyer Joseph Margulies on Tuesday argued the latest case on detainees’ rights, his responses to the Justices’ questions turned a supposedly simple argument into a complex maze, and the Court bluntly told him so. A telltale sign of his woe: Justice John Paul Stevens, whose vote Margulies almost certainly needs, seemed close to bafflement about that side of the argument as the Court heard the consolidated cases of Munaf v. Geren (06-1666) and Geren v. Omar (07-394).
This dispute is about the rights, if any, that U.S. citizens being held captive in Iraq by U.S. military forces there have to go into U.S. courts and challenge their detention and their transfer to Iraqi authorities for what they fear will be torture or abuse as part of criminal prosecution under Iraqi law. Margulies’ basic argument was simple: these are citizens, they are in the custody of U.S. military officials, and, by those facts alone, U.S. courts have jurisdiction to hear their habeas challenges. But, in an apparent need to accommodate what he seemed to think might be holes in his case, his argument wound up with an array of qualifying and complicating shadings. At one point, he even seemed to be conceding points that are being litigated energetically by lawyers who are defending other detainees in U.S. custody: that Congress has validly cut off habeas rights for foreign nationals, and that foreign nationals have no due process rights.
The lack of clarity was particularly telling because Margulies’ adversary, Deputy Solicitor General Gregory G. Garre, made an argument that was simplicitly itself. First, Garre argued, the detainees in Iraq are being held not by the U.S., but by an international military coalition, so they are simply outside the reach of U.S. courts. And, second, U.S. courts should not be second-guessing the criminal justice system of another sovereign nation. While the government lawyer here and there seemed to accept that some part of his argument might be weak, he managed to say that those points were not critical to this case, and could be left for another day.
The transcript of today’s argument in the consolidated cases of Munaf v. Geren (06-1666) and Geren v. Omar (07-394) is now available here.
The transcript of today’s argument in United States v. Ressam (07-455) is now available here.
[NOTE: This post adapted from a quick reaction posted over at Opinio Juris — please excuse the more-informal-than-usual, and somewhat contentious, tone.] My very preliminary reaction, after having read only a bit of the opinion, is that the presidential power question might not be the most important aspect of the decision. That would be, instead, the Court’s interpretation of Article 94 of the U.N. Charter as merely imposing a future obligation on the U.S. federal political branches to do something to comply with its requirement — and not to impose any independent obligation on the United States, including Texas, to actually take steps to comply with an ICJ judgment. This strikes me as an implausible interpretation, and as potentially very troubling for construction of treaty obligations going forward.
The article reads that the U.S. “undertakes to comply with with the decision of the [ICJ] in any case to which it is a party.”
The Court reads this obligation not to actually require the United States and its component parts to actually comply with an ICJ decision. Indeed, it apparently permits Texas (part of the U.S., last time I checked) to intentionally refuse to comply with such a decision.
What will this sort of treaty interpretation portend for, say, article 16 of the CAT, which provides that “each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”?” Apparently, that no longer means we are forbidden from intentionally inflicting such treatment on detainees — or so the Court’s reasoning appears to suggest.
UPDATED 1:49 p.m.
The Supreme Court, in a sweeping rejection of claims of power in the presidency, ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the President does not have the authority to order states to relax their criminal procedures to obey a ruling of the World Court. The decision came in the case of Medellin v. Texas (06-984). Neither a World Court decision requiring U.S. states to provide new review of criminal cases involving foreign nationals, nor a memo by President Bush seeking to enforce the World Court ruling, preempts state law restrictions on challenges to convictions, the Court said in a ruling written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
The Court explicitly, and with emphasis, rejected a presidential argument that the nation’s Chief Executive has power, on his own, to make an international treaty into binding law inside the U.S. That can only be done by Congress, it stressed.
The decision, aside from its rebuff of presidential power, also treats the World Court ruling itself as not binding on U.S. states, when it contradicts those states’ criminal procedure rules. The international treaty at issue in this dispute — the Vienna Convention that gives foreign nationals accused of crime a right to meet with diplomats from their home country — is not enforceable as a matter of U.S. law, the Roberts opinion said. And the World Court ruling seeking to implement that treaty inside the U.S. is also not binding, and does not gain added legal effect merely because the President sought to tell the states to abide by the decision, the Court added.
The ruling also is a defeat for 51 Mexican nationals who won a World Court decision in 2004, finding that U.S. states had denied them their consular access rights and advising the U.S. government to take steps to enforce the ruling. None of the 51 had been given access to a consular officer while their cases proceeded. In the specific case, Mexican national Jose Ernesto Medellin, convicted in state courts of murder, had sought to rely on the Vienna Convention. Texas courts ruled that he had defaulted on that right by failing to raise the issue at his trial. He then pursued a habeas challenge, arguing that the World Court decision and the Bush memo overrode the state default rule.
The Bush Administration did not agree with the World Court ruling, and, in fact, withdrew from the international protocol that gave the World Court the authority to enforce the Vienna Convention against countries that had signed it. Even so, Bush issued a memo in February 2005 agreeing that the U.S. would seek to obey the World Court, and he told the states involved to “give effect” to that tribunal’s decision in the cases of the 51 Mexicans involved in the World Court case. The U.S. government stepped into the case in Texas courts to assert the authority of the President to lay upon the states a duty follow his mandate to obey the World Court. The case thus reached the Supreme Court as a major test of presidential authority, in seeking to enforce treaty obligations, to override contradictory state criminal procedure rules. In that test, the presidency clearly lost.
The Chief Justice’s opinion was supported in full by Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice John Paul Stevens supported the result only. Stevens said that he found the issue to be a closer one than the Roberts opinion allowed, but said that he was persuaded “in the end” that the treaty did not authorize the Supreme Court to enforce the World Court’s ruling.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter.
In rejecting the Mexican nationals’ reliance on the World Court’s decision, the Chief Justice wrote that the ruling did impose “an international obligation on the part of the United States.” But that did not automatically give it legal effect “such that the judgment of its own force applies in state and federal courts.” The Court said that the legal effect of a World Court decision is controlled by Article 94 of the United Nations Charter, which means, the Court went on, that the U.S. and other member countries that submitted to World Court jurisdiction on a given dispute assume “a commitment…to take further action through their political branches to comply.” Thus, it added, Article 94 “is not a directive to domestic courts. It does not provide that the United States ’shall’ or ‘must’ comply” with such a ruling. Enforcement depends, it said, upon a diplomatic, not a judicial, remedy — that is, a political, not a legal, enforcement mechanism. The Court went on to say that this mechanism should not be turned over to state and federal courts in place of the political branches of the government.
“Our Framers established a careful set of procedures that must be followed before federal law can be created under the Constitution — vesting that decision in the political branches, subject to checks and balances,” Roberts wrote. To turn over to the judiciary the task of deciding when a treaty becomes domestic law, the Chief Justice added, would be to give the courts “the power not only to interpret but also to create the law.”
Turning to the question of the President’s authority to make the World Court decision binding domestically, the Court said that the Chief Executive’s power to act, as with the exercise of any governmental power, must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” It found no such authorization, rejecting claims that the Vienna Convention itself gives the President authority to implement the World Court ruling finding a U.S. violation, that Congress has acquiesced in that authority, that the President on his own has power to resolve international disputes apart from treaty enforcement, and that presidential power of that kind at issue is given by the Constitution’s allocation of power in the President to make sure that laws are “faithfully executed.”
Having found that the Vienna Convention is the kind of treaty that can only be executed in the U.S. if Congress expressly agrees to that, the Court said that the President may not do that on his own, or under some his interpretation of a treaty like the Vienna Convention. There is no congressional legislation to turn that Convention into domestic law, the Court found. If the President were to seek to unilaterally create domestic law, when a treaty ratified by the Senate was not a self-executing pact, that would contradict the Senate’s action of ratifying the treaty with the understanding it was not being made into domestic law. In that situation, the President’s power would be “at its lowest ebb,” quoting the famous formula laid out by Justice Robert Jackson in the Steel Seizure case in 1952 (Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer).
Quoting Founding Parent James Madison, saying that the President “in whom the whole executive power resides cannot of himself make a law,” the Chief Justice commented that that would “seem an apt description” of President Bush’s claim that he could unilaterally turn the Vienna Convention into domestic law.
Examining the government claim that Congress had, in fact, acquiesced in turning the World Court decision into domestic law, the Chief Justice found that none of the instances cited “remotely involved transforming an international obligation into domestic law and thereby displacing state law.”
The opinion stressed that the President could opt to comply with a treaty’s obligation “by some other means, so long as they are consistent with the Constitution.”
Refuting the government claim that the President’s February 2005 memorandum was a sufficient basis for implementing domestically the World Court ruling, the Chief Justice wrote: “The government has not identified a single instance in which the President has attempted (or Congress has acquiesced in) a Presidential directive issued to state cours, much less one that reaches deep into he heart of the State’s police powers and compels state courts to reopen final criminal judgments and set aside neutrally applicable state laws.”
Today’s opinion by Justice Souter in Hall Street v. Mattel (06-989) is now available here. Justice Stevens filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Kennedy joined. Justice Breyer also filed a dissenting opinion.
Today’s opinion by the Chief Justice in Medellin v. Texas (06-984) is now available here. Justice Stevens filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. Justice Breyer filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg joined.
The Supreme Court, in the first of its decisions Tuesday, ruled that parties to a contract may not agree by their contract terms to broader court review of an arbitration agreement and thus go beyond what federal law allows. The 6-3 ruling came in the case of Hall Street Associates v. Mattel (06-989).
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