On Monday, in Cooper v. Harris, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision to strike down two North Carolina congressional districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Since the opinion’s release, the case has continued to garner attention. Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times argues that Cooper highlights the Court’s role “as a forum for … Continue reading Weekly Roundup – May 25, 2017
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued three opinions and its Order List from last week’s Conference. The most newsworthy of the decided cases, Cooper v. Harris, involved a challenge to two congressional districts in North Carolina. The plaintiffs alleged that the districts were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The three-judge district court agreed, and the case … Continue reading The Week of May 22, 2017 at the Court
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its Order List from last week’s Conference and also issued opinions in three cases. Perhaps the biggest news of the day was the Court’s denial of certiorari in North Carolina v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. The North Carolina case involved a challenge to the state’s particularly … Continue reading This Week at the Court – May 15, 2017
On Monday morning, the Court took the bench and issued two opinions, both by Justice Breyer. The more high-profile opinion, in Bank of America v. City of Miami, involves whether and when a municipality can bring a lawsuit under the Fair Housing Act. In this lawsuit, and in a companion suit against Wells Fargo, Miami … Continue reading The Week Ahead – May 1, 2017
This week, the Court heard arguments in seven cases and issued an opinion in one. Perhaps the most high profile case of the week was the last one, particularly in light of the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Maslenjak v. United States asks whether a naturalized citizen may be stripped of her citizenship … Continue reading Weekly Roundup – April 28, 2017
This morning, the Court issued orders from the April 21 Conference, and convened to hear arguments in McWilliams v. Dunn and Davila v. Davis. The Order List was somewhat anticlimactic, as the Court did not grant any new cases. Many were expecting to see some grants now that Justice Gorsuch has joined the Court, but … Continue reading The Week Ahead – April 24, 2017
On this day in 2014 the Supreme Court announced its opinion in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. The case involved a 2006 amendment to the Michigan constitution, approved by a statewide referendum, that prohibited “all sex- and race-based preferences” in public education, employment, and contracting. The referendum was organized in response to Grutter … Continue reading This Day in Supreme Court History—April 22, 2014
Having a full complement of justices can be a matter of life and death, as became clear this week. In Justice Gorsuch’s first vote as a Supreme Court Justice, he provided fifth vote to overturn a stay issued by the Eighth Circuit, thus allowing Arkansas to proceed with the first in a series of executions, … Continue reading The Weekly Roundup – April 21, 2016
The Court began the week by welcoming Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch to the bench. As Richard Wolf of USA Today reports, Gorsuch was not shy about asking questions, and his questions focused forcefully on the text of the statutes the Court was considering. On Monday, the Court also issued its Orders List from the first … Continue reading The Week Ahead – April 17, 2017
Did you miss your Supreme Court news this week? Let our Weekly Roundup help. (To stay on top of the latest Supreme Court happenings, follow @ISCOTUS on Twitter.) On Monday, April 10, Neil Gorsuch was sworn in as the next associate Supreme Court justice, filling the seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia which remained … Continue reading Weekly Roundup – (delayed from) April 14, 2017