John Elwood at the Volokh Conspiracy and Kent Scheidegger at Crime and Consequences have noted a new resource for Supreme Court watchers. Certpool.com is a website dedicated to tracking the Court's certiorari docket. The site--developed by Texas attorney Don Cruse--separates SCOTUS petitions into federal circuits or state courts from which the petitions originated. This is a valuable site for SCOTUS [...]
Tom Goldstein and SCOTUS Blog put together their end-of-the-term memorandum and stat pack, which you can find here and here. A couple points about the 2010 Term statistics. Although every year the Court assails the Ninth Circuit, this Term really was THE Term of rebuke for the Ninth Circuit. The Court normally takes a lot of Ninth [...]
This week the Supreme Court handed down a decision that struck California’s ban on the distribution of violent video games to minors, in part because the majority found that children have a constitutionally protected right to free expression. Justice Clarence Thomas, one of two dissenters, filed an opinion rooted in his originalist [...]
I remember when Steve Lubet questioned whether former Solicitor General Ted Olson should be allowed to argue that the federal campaign finance reform statute was unconstitutional in Citizens United, because, as Solicitor General, he had argued a contrary position. At the time, I didn’t understand why that mattered since “advocates represent clients,” [...]
I will be writing a series of posts (entitled “Matters of Practice”) on the most frequently asked questions I receive about filing briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court. This is the first post in the series. At Cockle Printing, I am often asked what citation style the Supreme Court prefers and whether the Court’s rules specify [...]
Sometimes the Supreme Court reaches out to decide issues not raised in the petition for certiorari. It is a rare occurrence. But it happened in Turner v. Rogers, No. 10-10. If you weren’t following the case, here are the facts: Michael D. Turner racked up large debts owed to his child’s mother [...]
The U.S. Supreme Court largely ducked the most outlandish parts of the Second Circuit’s decision in American Electric. Instead, the Court reversed the lower court on the easiest of the several grounds for reversal: displacement of federal common law. But how would the political question doctrine have fared had the Court [...]
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, 10-277, June 20, 2011 A group of female employees sued Wal-Mart for gender discrimination, and sought to represent a group of about 1.5 million current and former women employees in a class action. The trial court acknowledged the unprecedented size of the class, but found that the [...]
CockleBur contributor and UVA Law Professor Dan Ortiz earned a big SCOTUS win yesterday in Borough of Duryea v. Guarnieri, No. 09-1476. This is how SCOTUS Blog's Lyle Denniston described the Court's opinion: Solemnly fretting that lawsuits by government employees challenging their bosses might disrupt official activity by, among other ploys, an emotional appeal to a jury [...]
The Supreme Court's decision today in Dukes v. Wal-Mart is a major victory for Wal-Mart, for consumers, and for the many women who depend on Wal-Mart for jobs and a livelihood. Pacific Legal Foundation filed a friend of the court brief in the case (and this brief in the Ninth Circuit before that). The case [...]