Every post published in 2009, most recent first.
For the first time in his tenure as the head of the national courts, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., on Thursday issued a year-end report with no requests for money or action to aid the judiciary — a bow, he said, to the current economic plight of the nation and to Congress’ already-full schedule.
The following post is our first by Professor Lisa McElroy, of Drexel University’s law school. Lisa has agreed to write Plain English posts for us on occasion that will recap the blog’s recent activity in terms understandable by non-lawyers.
To help illustrate the terms and concepts you will often encounter in discussions of the Supreme Court, we have written an imaginary Supreme Court case. We will be creating permalinks to this post on the blog as well as on SCOTUSwiki.
Book review Frank J. Colucci, Justice Kennedy’s Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kan., 2009), 186 pp. (cloth), $34.95. ———————- For all the power and influence that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wields on the current Supreme Court, one
The Court is still in holiday recess and will not hear any cases this week. The first activity at the Court in the new year will be the Justices’ private conference on Friday, January 8. Petitions to Watch for that conference will be posted soon.
Four recent requests for Supreme Court review have attracted some attention. The San Jose Mercury News reports on the Schwarzenegger administration’s “one last plea” for the Supreme Court to review a three-judge panel’s order to ease overcrowding in California prisons.
On October 5, the Court took what seemed to be a fairly unusual step in No. 08-1596, Rhine v. Deaton, when it asked the Solicitor General of Texas to file a brief expressing the views of the State of Texas in a challenge to a Texas statute that provides court-appointed counsel to parents facing the
Following up on yesterday’s New York Times editorial on access to federal courts, and in particular the Court’s recent decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the ACSblog – relying on Tony Mauro’s article in the National Law Journal – suggests that motions to dismiss (and decisions dismissing the
The Chicago Tribune and Christian Science Monitor report that on Monday the State of Michigan filed an original action against the State of Illinois. Michigan seeks to force the closure of shipping locks near Chicago to prevent carp from invading Lake Michigan and thereby damaging the state’s fishing industry.
In a new phase of the decades-long feud over the environmental health of the Great Lakes, Michigan has sued Illinois directly in the Supreme Court, this time over Michigan’s worries about the invasion of a fish species threatening to local fish populations.