In an already familiar 5-4 lineup, the Supreme Court has overruled Nevada v. Hall, which for 40 years has stood for the proposition that states generally lack sovereign immunity in one another’s courts.
Federal courts aficionados have been looking forward to the oral argument in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, and the event did not disappoint.
Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt is the federal courts case that keeps on giving. It is a SCOTUS “threepeater,” having now reached the justices on three separate occasions. It raises a rich sovereign immunity issue — namely, whether states should enjoy immunity in one another’s courts.
Richard M. Re is an assistant professor at UCLA School of Law. He served as a law clerk to Justice Kennedy during the October 2010 term. When I began law teaching, I asked Justice Anthony Kennedy for advice.
The Supreme Court’s brisk opinion in Dahda v. United States awarded the government yet another exclusionary rule victory, this time in the context of a statutory provision rooted in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
The oral argument in Dahda v. United States started off on a bad note for Los Rovell Dahda, who was represented by Kannon Shanmugam.
Dahda v. United States arguably poses a clash between two of the Supreme Court’s recent passions: strict adherence to statutory texts and cutting back on the exclusionary rule. This tension is unusual because the court’s exclusionary-rule decisions typically involve Fourth Amendment violations.
Last week, the Supreme Court issued a summary reversal to enforce its own clear and on-point precedent. In doing so, the court reminded the lower courts of how authoritative it is.
In Williams v. Pennsylvania, the Court ordered the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania to reconsider Terrance Williams’s allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
The oral argument in Williams v. Pennsylvania illustrated the difficulty of fashioning recusal rules that are both fair and administrable.
Can a prosecutor first approve a capital-punishment charge and then, after becoming a judge, adjudicate the defendant’s claim that the prosecutor’s own office had engaged in misconduct? That question is at the core of Williams v. Pennsylvania, which the Court will hear next week.
Today, a divided Court resolved Kingsley v. Hendrickson, an important case about excessive force, in the plaintiff’s favor. The precise question in the case had to do with the legal standard for excessive force in the context of pre-trial detention – a significant issue, to be sure, but also a relatively limited one.