In a big loss for the federal government, the Supreme Court held today that when the government attaches a GPS device to a vehicle to monitor the vehicle's movement, the government conducts a Fourth Amendment search. Justice Scalia wrote the opinion for the Court in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, backed by the Chief Justice, [...]
Yesterday, Justice Ginsburg announced the decision in Maples v. Thomas. For the second time in the last two years, the Supreme Court said that it matters when an attorney abandons their client. It Matters. For prisoners this is good news for those pursuing postconviction relief. The Court has long held that a criminal defendant has no right to [...]
Same-sex marriage promises to be an enormously divisive issue in this election year. No current candidate stands for gay marriage: President Obama advocates civil unions and Congressman Ron Paul says that the issue should be left to the states. Yet, several candidates are vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage. One of them is Rick Santorum. Now, [...]
This week, in what Adam Liptak at the New York Times suggested was “most significant religious liberty decision in two decades, the Supreme Court ruled in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC that: The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important. But so too is the interest of religious groups [...]
I am a little late on New Year's resolutions. But I thought I would shoot for three things I would like to see happen in the criminal justice system in 2012. At number three I would like to see the U.S. Supreme Court declare, loud and clear, that lawyers must be constitutionally effective at the [...]
Mainstream media—like CBS and the New York Times—have reported that in the days leading up to the Iowa primary, a large number of young adults have flowed into Iowa like this past summer’s floods down the Missouri river. They have arrived with one mission: aid and assist Presidential candidate Ron Paul in [...]
As Professor Michael W. Martin and I pointed out in our new articles in the Fordham Law Review (here and here), although a huge swath of litigation occurring in federal courts is a result of filings from pro se prisoners, very few of those litigants actually obtain some modicum of success, let alone win a new [...]
Yesterday, the New York Times published an article explaining the work of the Goldwater Institute, one of the leading libertarian organizations in the country. The GI's litigation arm generally challenges any government infringement of individual liberties, including what it calls entrepreneurial freedom. What I found most interesting is that the Goldwater Institute doesn't play favorites: it [...]
Cases at the U.S. Supreme Court often involve a collision of competing values, such as Fourth Amendment cases where the right to privacy runs headfirst into the ability of police to acquire relevant inculpatory evidence. Cases in which important values clash are some of the most difficult for the Court to decide [...]