Oh Antonin
During oral arguments in Gall v. US two weeks ago, the court discussed whether sentences that fell within guidelines are presumed to be reasonable. My earlier analysis of the case can be found here....
View ArticleSupreme Court Explains Denial of Stay in Mississippi Execution Case
Yesterday, The Supreme Court released an order in Berry v. Mississippi. In an unusual move, the Court denied Earl Berry’s stay for execution and proceeded to briefly explain their decision: The...
View ArticleSupreme Court Justices Are Influential Political Figures
UK’s The Telegraph created lists of the 100 most influential conservatives and the most influential liberals leading into the 2008 elections. John Roberts made number #8 on the conservative list,...
View ArticleWhich Justice Is The Most Talkative?
Two months into the term, the Supreme Court has held oral arguments in 19 different cases. After reading a few of the transcripts, I thought it would be interesting to see which Justices spoke most...
View ArticleWho Is The Funniest Justice?
After finding the most talkative Justice, I was interested in finding the funniest Justice. According to my calculations, there were 51 total references to (Laughter.) in the court’s first two months...
View ArticleHistory Repeats Itself
I found a neat article over at the New York Times Archives entitled “Ideas % Trends; Scalia Speaks Up, Quite Clearly, At Bar Convention from 1987. According to the article, Justice Scalia was the most...
View ArticleThoughts on Boumediene Oral Arguments
Oral Arguments took place this morning in Boumediene v. Bush and its sister case, Al-Odah v. US. Because of the heightened interest in the case, the Supreme Court opted to expedite the delivery of the...
View ArticleJustice Scalia At His Finest
This is nothing new, groundbreaking, or particularly insightful but I was reading Hill v. Colorado (2000) for one of my Constitutional Law classes and I stumbled upon this line from the introduction to...
View ArticleRandy Newman Critiques The Court During Apple Keynote
Randy Newman sang a rather interesting song at the conclusion of the Macworld Keynote Speech. Here was the relevant portion of his song: Its pissing me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to...
View ArticleSurprisingly Candid McCain and Obama Discuss Current SCOTUS Makeup,...
Earlier tonight, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama joined Pastor Rick Warren at his California megachurch for an event pegged as “The Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency.” The interviews, each...
View ArticleJustice Scalia Forced To Apologize During Oral Arguments
During arguments this week in Bell v. Kelly, Justice Scalia chided Richard Bress for not including a particular part of the statute in his briefs to the court. Unfortunately, Bress had included the...
View ArticleSupreme Court to Consider Another Obama Citizenship Claim in Wrotnowski v....
Just as everyone thought the Obama Citizen controversy was over in the Courts, another case has popped up. Even though I don’t share his concern, thanks to commentor ‘Ted‘ for bringing the latest case...
View ArticleFishing for a Story: How the Media Is Reading Too Much Into Referrals of...
Over the course of the past week, both the blogosphere and mainstream media have been spending quite a bit of time over at the Supreme Court rumor mill. There has been a lot of buzz about two cases...
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Oral Argument Stats Posted
Once again, I’ve conjured up some charts marking how often each Justice spoke during oral arguments in the first half of the term. You can find a detailed look into my methodology here but to...
View ArticleFootnotes in Supreme Court Opinions
The use footnotes has been a topic of quiet conversation around the judiciary for some time now. One group of Judges and practitioners (and an even larger percentage of students) find them to be...
View ArticleSupreme Introductions
(Nearly) every majority opinion features a short introduction before it jumps into the standard I, II, III, IV, etc structure. Some Justices simply introduce the facts very briefly (Scalia), while...
View ArticleSupreme Court Further Constricts Article III Taxpayer Standing
The Supreme Court continued its quest to strike at Article III taxpayer standing today in its opinion in Summers v. Earth Island Institute (here). In 1968, the Court ruled 8-1 in Flast v. Cohen (here)...
View ArticleJustices Breyer and Scalia Spar During Oral Arguments
Justices Breyer and Scalia went at it today during oral arguments in Horne v. Flores. Scene: Justice Breyer brings up a set of statistics from the record. JUSTICE SCALIA: Excuse me. I am not following...
View ArticleEnd of Term Thoughts
While I will readily accept that my end-of-term comments are even less relevant than usual because they are so belligerently late, I still think I have a few interesting things to point out about the...
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Agreement Between Justices Scalia and Thomas During October Term 2012
Over at Twitter, Mike Sacks posted an interesting question about the agreement rate between Justices Scalia and Thomas during October Term 2012: Is it me, or have Thomas and Scalia been on opposite...
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