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Last Tuesday, an alliance of government watchdog groups delivered 100,000 signatures to the Supreme Court along with a letter from hundreds of law professors calling on the justices to voluntarily adopt the code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges and to reform how they handle requests for recusals.

A federal appeals court ruling the next day on the case of a federal trial judge illustrates why recusal over a conflict of interest cannot be left solely to the judge involved and needs to be reviewed by other jurists. Yet the Supreme Court operates with no such mechanism, which is critical to preserving confidence in the court’s integrity.

scotus

The Supreme Court today unanimously held that the warrantless placement of a GPS tracking device on the outside of someone's car constituted a "search" under the language of the Fourth Amendment, thus affirming the DC Circuit's reversal of an alleged drug dealer's conviction on trafficking charges because it was obtained via illegal evidence. In doing so, however, the majority largely abandons the sometimes-circular "reasonable expectation of privacy" test for one focused on physical invasions of one's property, and the effects of this shift are important. ...

While the Court was unanimous as to the outcome here, it was not unanimous as to the reasoning. The majority view was penned by Justice Scalia, with the Chief Justice, Justice Kennedy, Justice Thomas, and Justice Sotomayor signing on. According to these five, whether Jones' reasonable expectations of privacy were violated was not the question, but rather, whether the search violated the expectations of privacy in existence when the Fourth Amendment was adopted, which was centered around invasions of one's property: ...

scotus civil_liberties

arizona scotus undocumented_immigrants

If only law followed its obvious, natural course. Oral argument in Perry produced widespread recognition of the indisputable fact that there is no evidence more persuasive and yet more unreliable [than eyewitness testimony].

...There is no single piece of evidence that has been subject to as much scrutiny as eyewitness identifications, and the empirical evidence is overwhelming, beyond dispute, whether reasonable or not, that it's uniquely unreliable and singularly persuasive. If nothing else, it's clear that unreliable eyewitness identifications contributed to 75% of wrongful convictions.

So what does a court, in order to protect the due process of individuals hauled before it and subjected to the potential of imprisonment, maybe even death, do about this ridiculously unreliable and persuasive piece of evidence? ...

"...'Why aren’t all those safeguards enough?' Justice Ginsburg asked."

The question may have been posed as a rhetorical, but there's a very good answer. Because it's failed to suffice forever.

scotus criminal_justice

It’s also worth noting that Bork also believed that not only the landmark Afrcian-American disenfranchisement case Baker v. Carr but the housing discrimination case Shelley v. Kramer were wrongly decided. Bork, in other words, on civil rights was to the right of a unanimous Supreme Court from 1948. We’re supposed to see his defeat in 1987 as some massive outrage against human decency?

scotus history

"When you say 'allegations,' it suggests that I was bringing some kind of claim against someone," she says, apologizing for the interruption. "That was not the case. I was giving testimony about my experience of working for an individual, testimony that read to the character and the qualification of an individual who was going to be sitting on the highest court of the country and given a lifetime appointment to that court. A lot of people have been confused by this kind of language -- 'allegations' and 'trial.' People start to ask whether I proved my case. Then they say, 'Wait a minute. If she didn't prove it, then why do we even care about it?' " ...

Questioning her motives for coming forward with her claims, Thomas supporters point out that she only brought them up years after the fact, when he was a Supreme Court nominee. An unfazed Hill shrugs off the controversy surrounding her. "I understand that people will believe differently, but I ask them to look at the record," she says. "It was truthful testimony, it was important testimony, and I have no regrets for having made it."

scotus clarence_thomas

scotus history

Two political scientists review a survey of perceptions about the U.S. Supreme Court and find the public may actually want the justices to trade their black robes for red and blue ones.

scotus

Justice John Paul Stevens' memoir, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir (Brown, Little, 2011), has been released. The book will be of interest to legal historians, including because Justice Stevens reportedly  expresses strong opinions about history as a source of constitutional interpretation. 

scotus

Efforts to hold Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accountable for ethics violations just jumped to the next level.
A group of 20 House Democrats led by Rep. Louise Slaughter are now pushing for a Justice Department investigation into various possible ethics infractions by Justice Thomas.
Please sign our petition supporting the call for an investigation now.

call_for_action clarence_thomas scotus

...Sorrell v. IMS Health, a 6-3 Court ... struck down a common-sense medical privacy law passed by Vermont. As part of its comprehensive regulation of pharmaceuticals, the state requires pharmacies to retain certain information about prescriptions and the doctors that order them. Knowing that the drug companies would love to take advantage of this information in order to target doctors to sell more of their product, Vermont protected medical privacy by prohibiting the sale to or use of this data by drug companies without the prescribing doctor's authorization.

According to the Roberts Court, the law allows anyone else to use the data for any other purpose and therefore cannot be defended as protecting medical privacy. It therefore characterizes the law as targeting speech based on the identity of the speaker and the content of the message, thereby triggering heightened First Amendment scrutiny...

scotus

...PLIVA v. Mensing, a case involving a woman seriously injured by the generic drugs she took. Since the manufacturer knew that the risks were much greater than had been believed at the time the FDA approved its labeling, she sued in state court over its failure to warn of those risks. Today, the five conservatives ruled that she has no right to file such a lawsuit.

scotus plutocracy

clarence_thomas scotus shenanigans

Please add your name to our petition calling on the House Judiciary Committee to investigate and to take steps to ensure the ethical conduct of Supreme Court justices.

call_for_action clarence_thomas scotus shenanigans

...there were warning signs that the Dukes plaintiffs would not fare well with the Supreme Court. It has long been understood that the court is wary of nationwide class actions. In addition, the plaintiffs in this case had sought to have their class of women employees seeking back pay certified under the class action device -- Rule 23(b)(2) -- reserved for plaintiffs seeking to stop defendants from engaging in discrimination, rather than wanting monetary relief as the victims of discrimination.

[Crunchy. -L]

sexism scotus

In 2001, a conservative, corporate-aligned think tank called the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) gave Justice Clarence Thomas the gift of a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln. ...

Thomas...either voted in favor of the result AEI favored or took a stance that was even further to the right in [Riley v. Kennedy, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, Whitman v. American Trucking Association]...

scotus clarence_thomas shenanigans

...in the court's eyes, sex discrimination is simply too pervasive to be a problem.
...The red meat of the Wal-Mart decision lies in the fight between Scalia and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg over a much more fundamental question: Was there a single question of law or fact common to all the women in the suit? The federal district court and 9th Circuit believed that there was. The five justices in the majority disagreed.
Scalia concludes that (even in advance of a lawsuit) the women could not show that Wal-Mart "operated under a general policy of discrimination." ... It's not Wal-Mart discriminating against women. It's just all these men doing it, and God knows men don't have unconscious biases and prejudices against women.

sexism scotus

The Supreme Court has just handed down a long-awaited decision  in the Wal-Mart v. Dukes case, in the process placing a high hurdle for the women of Wal-Mart to overcome pay discrimination.

sexism scotus

Following the Supreme Court decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, a devastating 5-4 decision in favor of the defendant, Wal-Mart, it is time for Congress to take the steps necessary to help close the wage gap that all female employees face in the workplace by effectively addressing wage discrimination and eliminating loopholes that have undermined the Equal Pay Act's effectiveness. The Paycheck Fairness Act would deter wage discrimination by closing loopholes in the Equal Pay Act and barring retaliation against workers who disclose their wages to coworkers.

sexism why_do_they_hate_families scotus

Any one of these instances would be troubling, but the fact that one justice has managed to accrue such a list is deeply disturbing and raises serious questions about what else Thomas might be hiding.

scotus clarence_thomas shenanigans