SCOTUSblog

The petition of the day is: Steager v. CSX Transportation, Inc. 16-1251 Issues: (1) Whether the dormant commerce clause requires a State that imposes a fairly apportioned use tax to also credit sales taxes paid to other States; and (2) whether the dormant commerce clause requires a State that does not impose county or municipal use […]

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Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia is the Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar and founding director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Penn State Law-University Park and the author of  “Beyond Deportation: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Cases.” On June 26, the Supreme Court ordered reargument in the case of Jennings v. Rodriguez, which involves […]

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Today we continue our symposium on the court’s ruling in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer. Today’s contributions come from Erwin Chemerinsky, Hillary Byrnes and Fred Yarger. These and other contributions are available at this link. Today we also began a symposium on October Term 2016’s death-penalty decisions. Today’s contributions come from Dominic […]

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Brianne Gorod is Chief Counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center. She filed an amicus brief in support of defendant Duane Buck in Buck v. Davis. With the election of Donald Trump as president and the addition of his Supreme Court nominee Justice Neil Gorsuch to the bench, there’s no question: The conservative court is back. […]

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Brian Stull is a senior staff attorney with the Capital Punishment Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. He filed an amicus brief in support of Bobby Moore in Moore v. Texas. As Justice Stephen Breyer forecasted two terms ago in Glossip v. Gross, the Supreme Court has continued its project of “patch[ing] up the […]

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Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College. The past year was, in many ways, a disappointing one for those seeking to end the death penalty in America. They lost at the ballot box and in the selection of a new […]

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Dominic Draye is the solicitor general of Arizona, which filed a brief for 16 states in support of the respondents in Moore v. Texas. In 1952, the Supreme Court took up the case of a soldier who deserted his unit during World War II. As punishment, the soldier lost his citizenship. His challenge to that sanction […]

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In one of the last decisions of its October 2016 term, a sharply divided Supreme Court yesterday ruled against a Texas prisoner facing a death sentence, declining to extend its 2012 ruling in Martinez v. Ryan. Instead, for a 5-4 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas concluded in Davila v. Davis that when a state prisoner fails […]

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Yesterday the justices of the Supreme Court released several decisions in cases that were argued on the merits and announced that they would add several new cases – including, most notably, the litigation over the president’s “travel ban” – to their docket for next term. The justices did not take the bench today, but they […]

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Fred Yarger is the solicitor general of Colorado. He filed an amicus brief for the state in support of the church in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer. Although it represents a significant victory for religious liberty, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer does not appear to alter fundamentally how the First Amendment will be […]

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