New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo urged the Supreme Court on Friday to stay out of the state’s battle with two Orthodox Jewish synagogues in New York City over an executive order that limits attendance at houses of worship as part of an effort to combat the coronavirus. Cuomo told the justices that because of “continued progress in containing COVID-19 spread,” the restrictions that the synagogues asked the court to block no longer apply to them.
Cuomo, a Democrat, issued the order at the heart of the dispute in October. The purpose of the order and the initiative that the order implemented, Cuomo explained in Friday’s filing, is to identify clusters of COVID-19 cases, to take “short-term aggressive measures” in and around the areas where those clusters are located to prevent the virus from spreading, and then to monitor the cases to determine how to proceed from there. When a cluster is identified, the area immediately around the cluster is known as a “red” zone; the area around the red zone is known as an “orange” zone, and the area around the orange zone is known as a “yellow” zone. Attendance at worship services is limited to 10 people at religious institutions in the red zone and 25 people in the orange zone. Attendance in the yellow zone is limited to 50% of the building’s maximum occupancy. Continue reading »
The Supreme Court announced on Friday morning that it would postpone oral argument in Department of Justice v. House Committee on the Judiciary, the dispute over access to secret materials from the Mueller investigation that had been scheduled for Dec. 2. The news came as part of the orders released from the justices’ private conference on Friday. The justices also added two more cases, both involving the scope of law enforcement officials’ authority to search, to their argument calendar for the term.
The decision to put off the oral argument in the Mueller case granted a request made three days ago by the House Judiciary Committee. In a filing on Tuesday, the committee told the justices that once a new Congress and President-elect Joe Biden take office in January, it “will have to determine whether it wishes to continue” its efforts to obtain the materials – the redacted portions of the report filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the secret grand jury transcripts and materials on which those portions are based. Continue reading »
This week we highlight cert petitions that ask the Supreme Court to review, among other things, whether Alaska Native corporations are “Indian tribes” who can receive CARES Act payments, whether courts should defer or decide disputes over church property, and how explicit police officers must be in explaining to a suspect her right to a lawyer before and during interrogations under Miranda v. Arizona.
In the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Congress established a different relationship with Alaska Natives than it had with Native Americans in the lower 48 states. Rejecting reservations, the ANCSA mandated the creation of “regional corporations” and “village corporations” to manage Native lands, administer settlement funds and act for the benefit of Alaska Natives. Fast forward to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, in which Congress directed the treasury secretary to disburse $8 billion of relief funds to the governing bodies of “Indian tribes” as defined in the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. This act defines “Indian tribe” as “any Indian tribe, band, nation, or other organized group or community, including any Alaska Native village or regional or village corporation … which is recognized as eligible for the special programs and services provided by the United States to Indians because of their status as Indians.”
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A little less than a month after the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court on Friday issued a new set of circuit justice assignments, which take effect immediately. Barrett was assigned to the 7th Circuit, where she served as a judge for three years before becoming a justice. Two other justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, were also assigned for the first time to the circuits where they had previously served as judges – Sotomayor to the 2nd Circuit and Gorsuch to the 10th Circuit.
A circuit justice is primarily responsible for emergency requests (for example, an application to block an execution or to allow it to go forward) from the geographic area covered by his or her circuit, as well as more mundane matters, such as requests to extend filing deadlines. However, justices can and often do refer significant emergency requests to the full court – a role that has taken on increased importance in recent years with the sharp uptick in activity on the court’s “shadow docket.” A map of geographical regions covered by each circuit is available here. Continue reading »
After a series of late Thursday-night orders that cleared the way for the federal government to carry out the latest execution of a person on death row, the Supreme Court meets Friday morning for its weekly private conference to consider pending petitions seeking the court’s review. Among the petitions slated to be discussed are two that were relisted from last week’s conference: one involving the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment, and the other involving the authority of Native American police officers to detain and investigate non-tribe members. Also on the agenda is a case involving the legality of programs in Medicaid that impose work requirements on recipients as a condition for maintaining health coverage. For a list of all the significant petitions we’re watching, see our petitions page. Continue reading »
The Supreme Court on Thursday night allowed the government to proceed with the execution of Orlando Hall, who became the eighth federal inmate to be put to death since the Trump administration resumed federal executions in July. Hall was sentenced to death for his role in the kidnapping, rape and murder of 16-year-old Lisa René in 1994.
In a one-sentence order, the Supreme Court lifted a district judge’s last-minute injunction that had temporarily blocked Hall’s execution. Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented and would have left the injunction in place.
The court also rejected three separate emergency requests filed over the past two days in which Hall asked the justices to postpone his execution. There were no noted dissents to the three brief orders rejecting those requests.
Shortly after the court’s orders, Hall was put to death at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He died at 11:47 p.m., according to local news reports.
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Here’s a round-up of Supreme Court-related news and commentary from around the web:
We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion, please send it to roundup@scotusblog.com. Thank you!
This article looks at the Supreme Court’s election law jurisprudence under the Roberts court. Supreme Court opinions and applications were searched from 2005 through the present for the term “election.” All cases were examined, and any that related to elections or voting procedures were maintained in the dataset. Cases were broken down across several issues including voting rights and procedures, vote counting, campaign finance and primaries. Several cases also dealt with First Amendment issues surrounding elections in the vein of Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, but these were not used because they dealt with peripheral issues rather than with voter participation. The breakdown of case types by frequency is as follows.
Click to enlarge.
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John Elwood reviews Monday’s relists.
If case numbers keep growing at the current rate, things will quickly become unsustainable. That’s right: Experts warn that if present trends continue, the Supreme Court will be relisting 8,388,608 cases per week by the end of June.
The court on Friday granted cert in last week’s single new relist, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, 20-107, presenting the question whether a California regulation that allows union organizers to enter the property of growers constitutes an uncompensated per se taking of property under the Fifth Amendment. But alarmingly, the court replaced it with two relists, setting it on a course of unsustainable exponential growth. Continue reading »
Here’s a round-up of Supreme Court-related news and commentary from around the web:
We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion, please send it to roundup@scotusblog.com. Thank you!
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