Every post published in September 2017, most recent first.
In District of Columbia v. Wesby, the Supreme Court has once again been asked to address the scope of qualified immunity, which bars constitutional claims against public officials unless they were found to have violated clearly established law.
Yesterday the Supreme Court added 11 cases to its docket for the upcoming term, for a total of nine hours of oral argument. Amy Howe has this blog‘s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court.
Supreme Court justices’ speaking engagements typically make headlines for what happens inside, not outside, the venue. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s keynote speech yesterday at The Fund for American Studies’ Defending Freedom Luncheon proved an exception to the rule, sparking protests in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Court-watchers are looking ahead to October Term 2017’s first oral arguments, which begin next Monday. At Howe on the Court, Amy Howe reports that the court has released the hearing list for the first argument session, which “contains a critical mass of veteran Supreme Court litigators,” noting that “women are relatively few and far between on the hearing list,” occupying only three of the 24 October argument slots.
[This post was updated at 12:48 p.m. to include more thorough discussions of Byrd v. United States, McCoy v. Louisiana, Rosales-Mireles v. United States, Hall v. Hall and the trio of cases consolidated under Dalmazzi v. United States.]
The state of Missouri today urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the dispute over two of the state’s abortion requirements. Last week, Planned Parenthood asked the justices to reinstate a lower court’s order blocking the state from enforcing those requirements, arguing that the requirements are identical to two Texas regulations that the Supreme Court struck down last year.
When District of Columbia police officers Andre Parker and Anthony Campanale responded to reports of unauthorized goings-on at a supposedly vacant home nearly a decade ago, they probably didn’t expect the evening’s events to lead to all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
To be frank, Rodney Class appears to be what Second Amendment friends and foes alike might call a gun nut. He allegedly told the FBI after his arrest that he is a “constitutional bounty hunter” who travels around the country with guns and other weapons in order to help enforce federal criminal laws against judges who he believes have acted unlawfully.
For the Associated Press, Kate Brumback reports that “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court granted a temporary stay of execution Tuesday night for a Georgia inmate whose attorneys argue that the 59-year-old black man’s death sentence was tainted by a juror’s racial bias.” At Reuters, David Beasley reports that
With the new term about to start, we thought it was time to look back and see what lessons we could learn from the relist statistics for October Term 2016.