Tag Archives: Court: U.S. Supreme

Election Law Blog: Via SCOTUSBlog comes the news that the Supreme Court, without comment, has denied cert. in Danielczyk v. U.S.,The decision not to hear the case is significant, because it means the Supreme Court majority, which has shown hostility to campaign finance limits, has decided not to move as aggressively as it could in further deregulating the campaign finance system.

NPR: The Supreme Court says it won’t hear a case that would have let candidates solicit money from corporations. By doing so, the court is reaffirming one strict ban on corporate political money, three years ago after easing other limits in its controversial Citizens United ruling.

The Atlantic: “What I tell my law clerks is that we write these so that they are accessible to regular people. That doesn’t mean that there’s no law in it. But there are simple ways to put important things in language that’s accessible. As I say to them, the beauty, the genius is not to write a 5 cent idea in a ten dollar sentence. It’s to put a ten dollar idea in a 5 cent sentence” . . . The quote that was likely most disheartening to his law student audience: “I wound up the court 17 years after I graduated. And I made my final payment on my student loan my third term on the court.”

Daniel J. Kevles at the NY Review of Books: Can genes be patented? This spring, the Supreme Court will hear a case that may well decide the question, and the consequences for American biomedicine could be huge.

Daniel Fisher at Forbes: Ten of the 15 decisions so far have been on 9-0 votes, and seven of those were unanimous. This follows the trend in the 2011-2012 session, when 30 of 77 decisions were 9-0, according to The Supreme Court Database. Last year, only 14 decisions came down with the supposedly inevitable 5:4 split, and more than half of those decisions were described as “liberal” by TSCD.

Buzz Feed: Denying same-sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutionally discriminatory, Mexico’s Supreme Court announced in a sweeping ruling made public Monday. The ruling not only makes a strong statement about Mexican law’s treatment of equal protection guarantees, it also relies heavily on civil rights rulings handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Breitbart: The Supreme Court has taken McClutcheon v. FEC for arguments this fall. McClutcheon is a challenge to the part of the current version of FECA that limits how much money an American citizen can give to one of the national political parties in a two-year period. Although the overall limit is slightly over $100,000, that’s beside the point of asking what empowers the federal government to tell a citizen how much communication he can have with his fellow citizens in the political process.

The Supreme Court has issued a ruling in Chafin v. Chafin. SCOTUS Blog links to the opinion and provides more information here. Issue: Whether an appeal of a district court’s ruling on a Petition for Return of Children pursuant to the International Child Abduction Remedies Act and the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction becomes moot after the child at issue returns to his or her country of habitual residence . . .

AP: “It has turned into a childish spectacle. I don’t want to be there to lend dignity to it,” Scalia said, with a certain amount of mischief.

ABC News 4: In October, the guardian ad litem for 3-year-old Baby Veronica caught in the middle of a custody battle filed a brief to the United States Supreme Court in support of the toddler’s adoptive parents, asking the high court to hear the case. | SCOTUS Blog Case Information

Washington Times: Supreme CourtJustice Antonin Scalia is skipping President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night and will be giving his own speech at an event hosted by National Public Radio at George Washington University.

SCOTUS Blog: From this wide range of viewpoints, two persistent and related themes have emerged: Supreme Court recusal is a matter of judicial ethics, and Congress should seek to protect the integrity and legitimacy of the Court by more closely regulating the Justices’ recusal practices.

Lyle Denniston reports at SCOTUS Blog:

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS Blog: With about two weeks left to think about it, the government’s top advocate in the Supreme Court — Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. — has a choice of getting into the issue of states’ power to define marriage in a big way, or not so big. He could jump into the middle of it by joining the constitutional challenge to California’s “Proposition 8.” Or he could take a more modest approach, and support the idea that the constitutional fate of “Proposition 8″ is not properly before the Court. The second choice may have more political appeal, if that is a factor he will consider.

One News: Christian attorney John Mauck argues that natural law and common sense provide ample reason to preserve marriage as it has always been understood — the union of one man and one woman.

SCOTUS Blog: Arguing that the National Labor Relations Board has lost its power to take any action, lawyers for a Connecticut nursing home company on Monday asked the Supreme Court to forbid a lower court from enforcing a Board order arising out of a union strike.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS Blog: The application Health Bridge Management v. Kreisberg, docket 12A769) thus put before the Court for the first time the high-profile constitutional controversy over the President’s authority to make temporary appointments of government officials — a power sharply restricted by the D.C. Circuit Court last month.

Robert Barnes at Washington Post: Instead, the nine brandish definitions as a way to dress up their subjective decisions with an “objective veneer,” they say.

The Concord Monitor interviews former Justice David Souter: Warner: But you do not think as some believe – Justice (Antonin) Scalia being one – that you can stick to what he calls the fair reading of the text, which he says is basically what a reasonable reader would understand the text meant at the time of its adoption? Souter: No, you cannot stick to that. I gave a speech a couple years ago in which I gave an example of why simply reading doesn’t do it. That is, if you look at the text of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech and so on,” no law sounds pretty tough. But in fact everybody recognizes – conservatives, liberals – there are some laws that Congress can make that in a practical sense do limit the freedom of speech.

SCOTUS Blog: Political polarization in Congress seems to be affecting the relationship between Congress and the Supreme Court, inadvertently strengthening the Court at the expense of Congress. These days – unlike in the past – Congress rarely overrides the Supreme Court’s statutory decisions. Yet the same congressional polarization that is strengthening the Court is likely to spill over into the Supreme Court nominations process, greatly increasing the risk of a Senate filibuster when the next conservative Justice leaves the Court.

The case landing page with document links: Perry v. Hollinsgworth U.S. v. Windsor

Liberty Counsel: Today, Liberty Counsel is filing two amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court on two marriage cases, the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) (U.S. v. Windsor) and California’s Proposition 8 (Hollingsworth v. Perry), a state marriage amendment. The High Court will decide both cases by the end of the term in June 2013. “We are at a pivotal point in history,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “Nothing will define the future of America more than the Court’s decision on marriage.”

Christian Newswire: Male-female marriage received a vigorous defense Monday in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Manhattan Declaration, Inc., the voice of more than 500,000 Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, filed a “friend of the court” (amicus) brief. The foundational document of this organization, which has gained over half-a-million signatures, addresses religious liberty, sanctity of life, and traditional marriage. (links to brief)

The job description is here.

Paul Campos at Salon: The Supreme Court justice is paid thousands to “teach” in Europe — and his law students are footing the bill

Gerard V. Bradley at Public Discourse: The Roe Court’s suppression of a foundational question—who is the law for—means that the decision could be overturned by any of several feticide cases that could reach the current Court.

Emily Bazelon at the New York Times: In October, the Fifth Circuit ruled in Amy’s favor, in a 10 to 5 decision. The court also accepted the theory of joint and several liability, finding that this means of allocating shared responsibility can ensure “that Amy receives the full amount of her losses, to the extent possible, while also ensuring that no defendant bears more responsibility than is required for full restitution.”

Daily Writ: I have a new Article out in the Journal of Legal Metrics entitled Top Supreme Court Advocates of the Twenty First Century. You can download the article here here. This Article identifies the Supreme Court litigators who have argued at least five times since October 2000, making them — by some measures — “expert Supreme Court litigators.”

Religion Clause Blog: On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Sherman v. Illinois, (Docket No. 12-621, cert. denied 1/22/2013).

SCOTUS Blog has posted as their petition of the day: Butt v. Utah.

Fisher, Jeffrey L., A Supreme Court Clinic’s Place in the Supreme Court Bar (February 29, 2012). Stanford Law Review, Vol. 65, 2012 ; Stanford Public Law Working Paper No. 1921430 . Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1921430 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1921430

USA Today: With the Supreme Court poised to take up two cases that could determine the future of gay marriage, supporters of its legalization are hailing President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address as a watershed moment, as he once again publicly embraced support for legal unions between gay couples.

WBTA1490.com: A religious freedom lawsuit involving the town of Greece could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The group Alliance Defending Freedom has asked the high court to reconsider an appeals court ruling involving prayers used to start Greece Town Board meetings.

Reuters: The power of federal government agencies over local authorities was at issue before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, in two complex cases whose outcome could affect the spread of wireless telephone services nationwide.

AZ Central: Despite winning many battles over the past four decades, anti-abortion forces may be losing the war.

Democrat and Chronicle: David Cortman is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which has represented Greece at no charge since the case was filed in 2009 by two Greece residents who objected to the prayers. He blasted the appellate court decision, noting a long history in the U.S. of opening legislative sessions with prayer. “The town of Greece had a constitutional practice of allowing citizens to voluntarily deliver a prayer according to the dictates of their own conscience,” he said via email. “While the district court upheld the practice, the appeals court found it unconstitutional because the town did not invite non-Christian clergy from outside its borders.”

Chris Gacek of FRC at the Washington Times: In May 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit issued an aggressive, secular ruling in a “legislative” prayer case arising from a small town in western New York. In Town of Greece v. Galloway . . . The court applied a totality-of-the-circumstances analysis that paid close attention to the content of the prayers. The court recognized the prayers “did not preach conversion, threaten damnation to nonbelievers, downgrade other faiths, or the like.” Nevertheless, the court balanced factors like the proportion of prayers offered by self-identified Christians, whether prayers “contained uniquely Christian references,” and finally whether the person offering the prayer used first-person plural pronouns (“we” or “us”).

Nathaniel Zelinsky at Huffington Post: In March the Supreme Court will hear two cases regarding the constitutionality of laws against same-sex marriage. There is a chance that the high court will rule against marriage equality. Ironically, that outcome could be a partial win for LGBTQ advocates.

SCOTUS Blog: Something really big, and potentially decisive, happened to a major new property rights case between the time the Supreme Court took it on, and Tuesday’s argument by lawyers before the Court. The very idea that an unconstitutional “taking” had occurred to an owner of a small plot of ground in Florida seemed near to vanishing, propelled toward oblivion by a spreading fear on the bench that maybe the entire regulatory apparatus of government might be at risk.

Matthew J. Franck at National Review: Far be it from me to suggest that the Supreme Court look to foreign sources or opinions to guide its deliberations in the two cases now pending on same-sex marriage. But the shape of things in the current French debate over this issue is instructive indeed.

FRC: Signed by 49 Members of Congress, including the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the document makes a convincing argument that prayers before government meetings are constitutional and a matter of religious liberty for all Americans. You can read the brief in its entirety here. FRC filed the brief on behalf of the Members to support the Alliance Defending Freedom’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Town of Greece v. Galloway . . . FRC’s friends at the Alliance Defending Freedom have compiled a list of all relevant briefs, including FRC’s and that of a group of distinguished theologians.

San Francisco Chronicle: In the most important ruling to date, a federal appeals court in Chicago has blocked enforcement of the mandate against an employer – not a church or a church-affiliated hospital or university, but an Illinois construction company whose principal owners, a married couple, are devout Catholics.

Jess Bravin at Wall Street Journal: Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir being published this week gives a fuller—and sometimes harrowing—dimension to the tale of her rise from a Bronx, N.Y., housing project to the nation’s highest court.

The New Republic: Much less is known, however, about old friendship between Olson and their opponent in this case, Charles Cooper, one of the many lawyers who helped Olson on Bush v. Gore. Cooper and Olson are both part of Washington’s tiny tribe of top-flight conservative litigators.

SCOTUS Blog: The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a plea by the national Republican party to free it from a three-decades-old court order that limits its right to challenge voters’ qualifications.

World Magazine: Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys who argued on behalf of the two researchers said the success of adult stem cell research has made federally funded research on embryonic stem cells “irrelevant.”

PRNewswire: Family Research Council’s (FRC) Ken Klukowski, J.D., has submitted an amicus brief on behalf of 49 Members of Congress supporting the Alliance Defending Freedom’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Town of Greece v. Galloway.

Supreme Court filings demonstrate breadth of support for historical practice of prayer before public meetings

Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: “Congress designed a law to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem cell and other research. That law is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent,” Steven H. Aden, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which co-litigated the case for Drs. Sherley and Deisher. “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments, and violate federal law—especially in burdened fiscal times like these.”

Baptist Press: “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments, and violate federal law — especially in burdened fiscal times like these,” said Steven H. Aden, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which helped litigate the case against the Obama administration. “Congress designed a law to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem cell and other research,” Aden said in a news release. “That law is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent.”

Cheryl Wetzstein at Washington Times: Congress passed legislation in 1996 “to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem-cell and other research,” said Steven H. Aden, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “We had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold [the law’s] clear intent.” ADF was one of the legal-defense groups representing plaintiffs Dr. James L. Sherley and Theresa Deisher, both scientists whose research uses only adult stem cells.

The HIll: “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments, and violate federal law — especially in burdened fiscal times like these,” said Steven Aden, senior counsel for The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian group that helped bring the case. “Congress designed a law to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem cell and other research. That law is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent.”

World Magazine: Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, who argued on behalf of the two researchers, said the success of adult stem cell research has made research on embryonic stem cells “irrelevant.” . . . The Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys challenging that policy on behalf of the two scientists argued that the guidelines gave incentive to destroy embryos, thus violating Dickey-Wicker. They also argued that the line between those destroying the embryos and the federal researchers using the destroyed embryos was fuzzy. But the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court rejected those arguments.

NBC: Steven Aden, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal center that helped litigate the case, criticized the decision Monday, saying the 1996 law “is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent.” “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments and violate federal law — especially in burdened fiscal times like these,” he said.

Christian Newswire: Today, on behalf of the adult stem researchers it represents, the Jubilee Campaign’s Law of Life Project and their co-counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, expressed great disappointment that the United State Supreme Court declined to hear their petition for certiorari.

Liberty Institute: oday, on behalf of several distinguished Christian theologians and scholars, Liberty Institute filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the United States Supreme Court supporting a request for the High Court to hear an important religious freedom case that could determine the future of prayers before legislative bodies throughout the U.S. The theologians seek to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit’s ruling in the case Galloway v. Town of Greece, which declared the town’s legislative prayers unconstitutional because they were not religiously diverse. A copy of the brief may be found here.

LifeNews: Thomas G. Hungar, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, which includes the Alliance Defense Fund and the Christian Medical Association, said in 2009 when the lawsuit was filed, “the language of the [Dickey-Wicker] statute is clear” that it “bans public funding for any research that leads to the destruction of human embryos.” . . . Sam Casey, General Counsel of Advocates International’s Law of Life Project, a public interest legal project involved in the case, pointed out that NIH officials have admitted they violated the public comment process by ignoring the majority of comments coming from pro-life advocates opposed to destroying unborn children for their stem cells.

“Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments, and violate federal law–especially in burdened fiscal times like these. Congress designed a law to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem cell and other research. That law is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent.”

AP: The Supreme Court won’t stop the government’s funding of embryonic stem cell research, despite some researchers’ complaints that the work relies on destroyed human embryos.

FRC: We’re also grateful for their gutsy legal team–Tom Hungar of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Sam Casey of Law of Life Project, Steve Aden of Alliance Defending Freedom, and their colleagues, who gave this battle–and so many innocent lives–their absolute best.

FRC Blog (1/4 – links to filings): If you’ve lost track of where things are with the federal lawsuit to stop taxpayer funding of destructive embryonic stem cell research, here’s the update. | also posted at LifeNews

The Hill: “I do not expect the Supreme Court to find in the near term that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” Frank said. “And that’s not what the LGBT groups are asking for. We’re asking for a recognition by the federal government of state marriages.”

Speak Up Movement: It is important that you as a pastor have the right information to convey to your church members about this issue. Alliance Defending Freedom has been at the forefront of these battles in courtrooms across the country and we want to ensure that you know what is happening in these significant cases so that you can take appropriate action.

Washington Post: “Yes, for each citizen’s tax dollar, only two-tenths of one penny go toward funding the entire third branch of government!” Roberts wrote. “Those fractions of a penny are what Americans pay for a judiciary that is second to none.”

Virgin Islands News: President Barack Obama signed into law a bill authorizing direct review of V.I. Supreme Court decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, Delegate to Congress Donna Christensen said Saturday. Christensen sponsored the legislation, H.R. 6116, which amends the Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands, with respect to the judicial procedure for appealing the decisions of courts of the Virgin Islands to courts of the United States.

Cherminsky at the ABA Journal: The year 2012 saw blockbuster decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court. The court will be most remembered for largely upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius), and for striking down key provisions of Arizona’s restrictive immigration law, SB 1070 (in Arizona v. United States). In both, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the more liberal justices over the strong dissents from the court’s most conservative members.

Casey Mattox at Townhall: What might have been? If Robert Bork had been confirmed, perhaps this column would have appeared in this space. | also posted at Life News

Ken Klukowski at Breitbart: Becket’s loss thus far in this case is in contrast with the major victory Becket won last week in another federal appeals court, where (as we rightly predicted) the D.C. Circuit issued an injunction forbidding HHS from enforcing its regulation as currently written against Christian colleges. It’s also in contrast with early court victories in some of the other lawsuits by the Alliance Defending Freedom, among others.

Mark Sherman at AP: “The vicious opposition by the left to Bob Bork’s nomination turned what had sometimes been a contentious confirmation process into literally a political campaign,” Meese said Wednesday.

Wall Street Journal: The U.S. Senate has had many low, retrograde moments, but easily among the worst was its 1987 rejection of Robert Bork to sit on the Supreme Court. Bob Bork died Wednesday at age 85, having contributed far more to American law than the 58 Senators who voted against him and more than most Supreme Court Justices.

Wall Street Journal: Without the Constitution’s original intent as their guide, wrote the great jurist who died Wednesday at 85, justices are left with merely their own ‘moral philosophy.’

The New American: Alan Sears of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group, said in a statement that Judge Bork “stands as a constitutional giant of our generation, indeed, one of the greatest legal minds and tireless defenders of religious freedom in American history.” Sears said that Bork “had a dramatic impact on our nation, on its legal culture, and on the minds and hearts of many of its finest judges, law professors, students, and attorneys. Perhaps his greatest mark was the restoration of scholarship on Originalism, which has helped preserve the ingenious framework for freedom forged by our nation’s founders that many others in the legal profession had hoped to toss into the dustbin of history.”

Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic (includes video of the confirmation hearings): The relentless honesty and arrogant mien of Robert Bork, who has died at 84, during his unforgettable 1987 Supreme Court nomination hearing resulted in two very important things for this nation. First, it precluded the ideologue from becoming a life-tenured justice, which has meant over the intervening 25 years many saving graces for progressives and many bitter disappointments for conservatives. Second, it changed (forever, I suspect) the way judicial confirmation hearings unfold, by encouraging earnest nominees to say to the Senate Judiciary Committee nothing at all candid, specific, or profound about their judicial philosophies or views of the law.

Jeffrey Rosen at the New Republic: My contribution to the epic battle was modest: I helped with research for a speech on the history of the confirmation process, in which Biden argued that the Senate had the duty to scrutinize not only the legal qualifications but also the constitutional views of nominees. This was a controversial proposition at the time; today it has been taken to extremes that neither Biden nor Bork, who died today at 85, could have imagined.

Judge Robert Bork stands as a constitutional giant of our generation, indeed, one of the greatest legal minds and tireless defenders of religious freedom in American history.