scotusblog

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]

The law banning depictions of animal cruelty at issue in a Supreme Court argument this morning may not survive, reports Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.
The federal law makes it illegal to make and sell commercially “any visual or auditory depiction” of the killing or serious abuse of a living animal so long as that conduct is [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning had good news: “Justice Ginsburg was released from Washington Hospital Center this morning and plans to be at work at the Court this afternoon.”
Ginsburg was hospitalized yesterday after “feeling ill in her chambers earlier in the day,” the Court announced.  An hour after receiving an injection in response to [...]

Here’s Scotusblog’s Lyle Denniston’s take on this morning’s argument in the campaign finance case Citizens United v. FEC:
If supporters of federal curbs on political campaign spending by corporations were hoping that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., would be hesitant to strike down such restrictions, they could take no [...]

In yet another case that questions the power of federal courts to rein in the government’s executive branch, the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday issued a mandate that allows the government to send up to 150 Guantanamo detainees to other countries over the prisoners’ objections, Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog reports. The ruling [...]

In a highly unusual decision, a majority of Supreme Court justices yesterday ordered that a federal judge in Georgia must hear new evidence that lawyers for Troy Davis have been saying for years will prove his innocence.
Davis, as I’ve explained before, has been on death row in Georgia since 1989, when he was found guilty [...]

On Thursday, the Supreme Court will meet to decide, among other things, whether to take up the case of Kiyemba v. Obama, in which the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled that federal courts do not have the power to order any Guantanamo detainees released into the United States.
As Lyle Denniston at [...]

The Supreme Court today announced it won’t get involved in a lawsuit brought by El Paso and other Texas counties against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano over construction of a border fence intended to deter illegal immigrants.
The Texas local governments had argued that Michael Chertoff, Napolitano’s predecessor, improperly waived dozens of federal laws that could [...]

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog reminds us that today is the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Boumediene v. Bush, which confirmed that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts. Coincidentally, today the Washington Post also reported on its front page that the Obama administration has given up [...]

Not content with the right-wing pundits’ method of evaluating Judge Sonia Sotomayor by hurling epithets and baseless accusations against her, Tom Goldstein, the eminent Supreme Court litigator and editor of SCOTUSblog, has actually done the hard work of reading Sotomayor’s opinions in cases involving race.  Here’s what he found:
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and [...]