Attorney Pete Patterson’s latest post on birthright citizenship repeats the biggest mistakes of his original post and also makes some new mistakes, chasing irrelevances and mangling the key legal issues. Today we will briefly highlight some of the biggest flaws of Patterson’s latest essay. If Patterson would like to continue the conversation, we hereby invite him to do so as a future guest on Akhil’s podcast.

Next week’s argument in Jules v Andre Balazs Properties considers a technical question about the jurisdiction of federal courts to enforce an arbitration award. It is the immediate successor of a case from 2022, Badgerow v Walters, which held that federal courts do not have jurisdiction based on the Federal Arbitration Act to grant that relief. The question here is whether a federal court that has a pending case over which it had jurisdiction to compel arbitration can use that jurisdiction to entertain a motion to confirm the arbitration award.

Yesterday’s argument in Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction displayed a bench almost uniformly skeptical of a lower court’s absolute standard for responding to the failure of a debtor in bankruptcy to mention one of its assets to that court.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Monday in Abouammo v. United States, in which it will consider whether federal prosecutors can try a defendant not only in the district where the offense actually occurred, but also in the district where the crime’s “contemplated effects” are felt.

Professors Akhil and Vikram Amar have responded to my recent post arguing that the 14th Amendment does not grant automatic citizenship to the children of temporary visitors to the United States. As a practicing attorney, I am accustomed to having the opportunity to file a reply brief, and I thank the editors of SCOTUSblog for allowing me to briefly respond to the Amars’ arguments.