With the news that the Solicitor General has joined with Affordable Care Act opponents to request a US Supreme Court ruling on the individual mandate, Randy Barnett over at The Volokh Conspiracy is predicting a decision in mid-June of next year. It got me thinking about my schedule for that summer... March 12th, a solemn [...]
Supreme Court practice has a language unto itself. One of the terms you will occasionally hear at the certiorari stage is that a petition has “vehicle problems.” Well, what does that mean? And what the heck is a vehicle? The Court doesn’t like to waste time. So when they consider granting a [...]
The US Supreme Court is currently taking merits briefs in Williams v. Illinois, the most recent in a series of modern high court cases seeking to re-establish the vitality of the Confrontation Clause. Prior to 2004, a court’s hearsay-exception analysis turned on the question of trustworthiness, asking if the circumstances of the proffered out-of-court statement [...]
[This is another installment in the Matters of Practice series—designed to explain specific problems facing Supreme Court cert petitioners.] Not every granted petition for certiorari raises an issue on which the lower courts are divided; it just seems that way. While circuit conflicts are by far the most common [...]
As I explained last year, there may be no more daunting task in all Supreme Court practice than distilling a 9,000-word—or hopefully less—cert petition down to one or two Questions Presented. Although crafting QP’s are difficult, you can improve your QP’s by combining a few of the following techniques with lots of [...]
The intersection between state law sanctifying medical marijuana and federal law outright banning it is a hot topic around the country. On Tuesday, the debate landed at the U.S. Supreme Court’s white marble steps. An Oregonian County filed a petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that a federal law banning firearm possession [...]
The Washington Post covers the work of LeRoy Carhart--the Nebraska abortionist whose legal challenges were twice reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Since Nebraska passed laws banning abortions beyond 20 weeks of gestation, the WP reports that Carhart has moved his abortion practice to Maryland. The WP notes that "[m]ost of the abortions Carhart performs [...]
Ross Guberman is President of Legal Writing Pro, Adjunct Professor at George Washington University Law School, and author of Point Made: How to Write Like the Nation’s Top Advocates. I learned of Ross’s work after reading an essay entitled “Five Ways to Write Like John Roberts.” In the essay, Ross distills five [...]
With the start of the summer recess, the Supreme Court discontinued use of the 2010 Term docket numbers, ending with number 10-1558—a petition for mandamus filed by firefighter Frank Ricci. Yes, that Frank Ricci. For the fifth straight year, the number of paid petitions for certiorari, mandamus and original habeas corpus filed [...]
David Kopel over at the Volokh Conspiracy provides some insight into Messerschmidt v. Millender, No. 10-704. That petition was filed by Tim Coates, of Greines, Martin, Stein & Richland, and the petition was printed at Cockle Printing. The Questions Presented are: This Court has held that police officers who procure and execute warrants later determined invalid [...]