Supreme Court takes no action yet again on major campaign finance petition. Court could eventually grant, or, perhaps at this point more likely now would be either some kind of summary action or a dissent from denial of cert. from … Continue reading
Category Archives: Supreme Court
The San Francisco Review of Book’s Joseph Cotto interviewed me about my book on Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence and legacy. Watch: … Continue reading
Read it here. … Continue reading
As early as Friday, the Supreme Court could announce it will hear a case that could put the nail into coffin of limits on campaign contributions to candidates. Here’s my preview in The Atlantic from last summer about this Paul … Continue reading
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy column. … Continue reading
Slate: “For the first time ever,” Justice Elena Kagan declared on June 27, “this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”Kagan was reading a summary of her dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause, … Continue reading
Interesting: Mr. Buttigieg criticized Ms. Warren and Beto O’Rourke for being too extreme on health care and guns at last week’s Democratic debate, and now he’s changing on the issue that ignited his unlikely candidacy. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, … Continue reading
Pete Williams: The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a challenge to maps drawn by Republicans for state legislative and congressional district boundaries in Michigan.The decision, which allows the GOP districts to stand, was expected because the court declared in … Continue reading
Justin Levitt deftly explains the importance of last term’s census case in the ACS Supreme Court Review. … Continue reading
The New Guy Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer piece in the ACS Supreme Court Review pulls no punches.: Rucho is not an easy case to take seriously as doctrine. Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion is more redolent of a debater’s brief than a … Continue reading
Adam Liptak NYT Sidebar: The court will decide whether to hear the case, Carney v. Adams, No. 19-309, sometime this fall.Delaware’s Constitution says that judges affiliated with any one political party can make up no more than a “bare majority” on … Continue reading
Joan confirms what many of us suspected from reading the opinions in Dep’t of Commerce v. NY: Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote against President Donald Trump’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, but only after … Continue reading
Reuters: The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a libertarian nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, filed a petition this week at the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to review a 2018 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would require … Continue reading
Logan Struther and Shana Kushner Gadarian have posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract: We examine the role that mass perceptions of the Supreme Court’s institutional nature—particularly how “political” it is—plays in assessments of its legitimacy. In a … Continue reading
Watch here: The Atlantic article is: Unlimited Donations to Candidates, Coming Soon? … Continue reading
I have written this piece for The Atlantic. It begins: During the George W. Bush administration, then–Solicitor General Paul Clement successfully defended the constitutionality of the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, which tightened electioneering and fundraising regulations. Can Clement now get traction … Continue reading
Chock full of election-law goodies. Among other pieces: Elizabeth Warren, Foreword (on corruption and faith in government)Jeffrey Clements, “But It Will Happen”: A Constitutional Amendment to Secure Political Equality in Election Spending and RepresentationViki Harrison, How One State Legislature Grappled … Continue reading
President Trump’s Speech this afternoon in which he said that the Administration would give up on efforts to add a citizenship question to the census is a victory for the rule of law. Many people were predicting that Trump would … Continue reading
I’m seeing a lot of hyperventilating on Twitter and elsewhere about how President Trump is about to start a constitutional crisis through an executive order that would mandate inclusion of the citizenship question on the census. If Trump actually ordered … Continue reading
Here, at the Public Discourse. … Continue reading
Joey Fishkin: So that leaves what I’d call the Evenwel Gambit: fess up, selectively, to Real Reason 2. Claim that you want to add the citizenship question to the Census in order to enable the CVAP-based drawing of district lines … Continue reading
I thought I’d pull together some thoughts on the issue of whether the Trump Administration will try again to add a citizenship question to the census, after sharing some earlier thoughts across this blog, to NPR, and at Slate. The … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Rebecca Green, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: The Rucho decision is hard to get your head around. Plaintiffs presented two clean cases with clear “smoking guns”: partisan gerrymanders in which legislators … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Moon Duchin, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Justice Kagan’s dissent in Rucho states in its opening paragraphs: “The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Guy Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: One would be hard-pressed to find a more hackneyed Supreme Court opinion than Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion in Rucho. It … Continue reading
Washington Post: Trump was furious and thought the Commerce Department and the Justice Department — which has been arguing the case — had given up the fight too easily. He complained about Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.,who he said … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Michael Morley, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Rucho v. Common Causepresents competing judicial conceptions of American voters. Justice Kagan’s dissent encourages courts to employ … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Mike Parsons, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: In holding that partisan gerrymandering claims are not “resolvable according to legal principles” and are “therefore beyond [federal] courts’ jurisdiction,” Chief Justice … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Justin Levitt, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Last Thursday’s Rucho majority opinion brought many indignities. The shadowboxing with strawmen, in the form of proportionality claims no litigant put forward. The … Continue reading
Linda in the NYT: But first, the census case. I’ve been obsessed with imagining whatever dark night of the soul preceded the chief justice’s last-minute decision to shift course and reject the administration’s position.I readily admit that I have no … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Rick Pildes, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Now that the Supreme Court’s decision means that limits on partisan gerrymandering will have to come from venues such as Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRC) … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Keith Gaddie, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Felix Frankfurter called redistricting a “political thicket” which the federal courts would do well to avoid. And, when the court did dive into … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Wendy Tam Cho, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: We have been focused for some time on the Supreme Court’s role in regulating partisan gerrymandering. Now that we know the Supreme Court … Continue reading
It is undeniably good news that the Trump Administration decided to abandon the citizenship question in the face of evidence that it would depress turnout especially among those with noncitizens in a household and in light of the Supreme Court’s … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Sam Issacharoff, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: The 33-year search for judicial standards in partisan gerrymandering cases came to a crashing conclusion this Term. As Justice Kagan noted in … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Franita Tolson, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that a partisan gerrymandering claim presented a nonjusticiable political question because of the lack of … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Bruce Cain, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Given all the various ways that the Republicans have gamed election rules in recent years to stay in power, I fully understand … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Nick Stephanopoulos, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Both gerrymandering cases the Court decided this term—Rucho v. Common Cause out of North Carolina, and Lamone v. Benisek out of Maryland—began … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Deborah Hellman, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Last week’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause rests on the claim that the Supreme Court cannot determine when districting is unfair because … Continue reading
David Gans for Take Care. … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Joey Fishkin, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: When I teach Rucho, I expect it will pair well with Colegrove v. Green, the long-overruled 1946 case in which a closely divided … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Ned Foley, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Partisan gerrymandering should be unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise. Anger at Chief Justice Roberts for this 5-4 decision is … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Michael Solimine, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: A 5-4 majority of the United States Supreme Court in Common Cause v. Rucho held that challenges to partisan gerrymandering are “political … Continue reading
Reuters reports. … Continue reading
See this post at the LSE US Centre. … Continue reading
Others have made this point, but I wanted to flag this gratuitous and unsupported impugning of district court judge Furman in the census case. Thomas painted Furman as a conspiracy theorist in his partial dissent (joined by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh): … Continue reading
Here at Howard. … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Travis Crum: In Rucho v. Common Cause, the conservatives on the Supreme Court finally prevailed on their decades-long effort to declare partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political question. Rather than add to the legion … Continue reading
I have written this oped for the New York Times. It begins: The Supreme Court decision on Thursday in Rucho v. Common Cause purports to take federal courts out of the business of policingpartisan gerrymanders and leave the issue for states to handle. … Continue reading
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent for WaPo. … Continue reading