Every post published in 2015, most recent first.
Briefly: In The Huffington Post, Cristian Farias reports that the brief filed by the United States last week in Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle (which Lyle Denniston covered for this blog) has “made waves far beyond, eliciting a media maelstrom in Puerto Rico, impassioned responses from officials and
Speaking in soft but plain words, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., used his year-end report on Thursday night to urge lawyers who practice in federal courts to take steps to help improve the efficiency, and reduce the cost, of trying cases.
Briefly: At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston “looks at the Justice Department’s stance on Puerto Rico’s sovereignty, which will get tested twice in the Supreme Court this year.” In the Los Angeles Times, David Savage reports that, as “the nation heads into a presidential election year, the
FURTHER UPDATE Thursday 2:33 p.m. The Supreme Court has now scheduled this case to go before the Justices at their private Conference on January 15, according to the Court’s docket.
In The Washington Post, Janell Ross reports on an interview with Justice Stephen Breyer, noting that the interview “did highlight a kind of sleeper issue scarcely mentioned in public since the 2016 presidential campaign began in earnest”: “Assuming that the composition of the court remains unchanged, Breyer will celebrate his 78th birthday by the time the next president takes office in January 2017.
FURTHER UPDATE: Thursday, 2:41 p.m. The movement of the case on a faster schedule apparently resulted from the decision of government lawyers to waive their right to file a reply brief after the states had filed their opposition brief. UPDATED Wednesday 11:51 p.m.
In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse weighs in on the challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions policy; she suggests that, although there “is only a remote chance that the case will spell a formal end to affirmative
In the category of “papers I wish I’d written,” I have to recommend one from this month’s issue of Law & Society Review: Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions, by William D. Blake, Hans J. Hacker, and Shon R. Hopwood.
The Obama administration, relying on legal precedents going back more than a century, has urged the Supreme Court to rule that Puerto Rico remains a dependent U.S. territory and does not govern itself as an independent “sovereign.” It thus challenged the island commonwealth’s claim that since 1952
UPDATED at 1:10 p.m. (in the final paragraph) to clarify how the motion will be handled by the Supreme Court. ————- A group of Hawaiians challenging the move to set up a new “native Hawaiian” nation within the state returned to the Supreme Court Tuesday, seeking an order to hold the organizers in contempt and further orders to stop the entire process toward establishing sovereignty.