63 articles
On Thursday, the Supreme Court announced that it would close its doors to the public “until further notice” “[o]ut of concern for the health and safety of the public and Supreme Court employees.” The announcement follows the news earlier on Thursday that the Capitol would close to visitors until April 1, the first disease-related closure of the building to the public since the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918.
The Supreme Court is the court of last resort for death row inmates around the country. The vast majority of death row inmates are convicted and sentenced under state death penalty laws, and so most of the capital appeals that the court reviews concern state statutes.
Any review of a calendar year at the Supreme Court necessarily includes two different terms: the term that ends in June and the new one that begins in October and will run into the following year. But a look back at 2019, in particular, reveals two very different terms.
The death penalty has generated dispute and controversy at the Supreme Court for decades. This past term was nothing new.
As the federal constitutional convention drew to a close, the delegates appointed the Committee of Style and Arrangement to prepare a final Constitution from the textual provisions that the convention had previously adopted.
The following is a series of questions prompted by the forthcoming publication of Michael Bobelian’s “Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court” (Schaffner Press, 2019).
The following is a series of questions posed by Ronald Collins to Stephen Budiansky concerning Budiansky’s book “Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas” (W.W. Norton, 2019, 592 pp., cloth: $29.95). Stephen Budiansky is the author of 17 books of biography, history and science.
Shortly before his death in 1826, President John Adams was quoted as saying, “My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life.” Adams was one of the earliest exponents of the view that nominations to the Supreme Court form a very important part of any president’s legacy.
The following is a series of questions prompted by Stephanie Slater’s “Edward Terry Sanford: A Tennessean on the U.S. Supreme Court” (University of Tennessee Press, 2018).
Even before Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy this fall, some commentators were suggesting that liberals might want to avoid appealing cases to the increasingly conservative Supreme Court. “If you are liberal,” wrote Ian Millhiser of the Center for American Progress in 2014,
The specter of the law clerk as a legal Rasputin, exerting an important influence on the cases actually decided by the Court, may be discarded at once. … It is unreasonable to suppose that a lawyer in middle age or older, of sufficient eminence in some walk of life to be appointed as one of nine
Justice Elena Kagan, speaking on Tuesday at the Supreme Court, briefly addressed “the very sad news” that former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is “retiring from public life because she is in the early stages of dementia.” “In very typical Justice O’Connor fashion,” Kagan continued, “she used this sad