DailyWrit

I just finished the Term Index, which you can find here.
Number of Opinions Released: 72
Per Curiam Decisions: 5 (7%)
Unanimous Decisions (9-0, 8-0): 24 (33%)
Lone Dissenter(8-1):6 (8%) [Thomas(3), Ginsburg(2), Breyer(1)]
Two Dissenters (7-2, 6-2, 5-2) :19 (26%)
Three Dissenters(6-3, 5-3): 9 (13%)
Five-to-Four Decision: 9 (13%)
More to come as I have more time to crunch numbers.

First, Davis v. FEC came down against the “Millionaire’s Amendment.” Alito read from his majority opinion. Not terribly surprising, but almost certainly an interesting read. Interestingly enough, the Court took down disclosure requirements and contribution limits. Contribution limits went down for not being equally applied across the board and “disclosure requirements, which were designed to […]

Now, for Heller: Affirmed, quite naturally. Wow! It came down 5-4, with none of the traditionally ‘liberal’ Justices joining the pro-gun rights majority. Scalia must have written an incredibly strong majority opinion and the ‘conservatives’ must have been unwilling to budge.
Opinions are straight 5-4, one majority and two dissent. No concurring, partials. I’m surprised […]

The Supreme Court is set to release DC v. Heller and two other cases this morning. The cases will be announced between 10:00am and 10:15am EST, and the opinions will be online minutes later. I’ll be posting my initial thoughts and opinions here, and I’ll be linking to others around the ‘net as they do […]

The Term Case Index for OT07 is now representative of everything the Court has handed down thus far in the term. As always, you can find it either along the top of the page or here. When the court hands down the remaining three cases from the term, I’ll post a complete statistical breakdown similar […]

Law blogs (or blawgs, if you’re a silly person) are going absolutely nuts over the impending Heller decision. Over at Volokh, the everawesome (and possibly evergreen) Professor Kerr has a post telling everyone to come back tomorrow and one commenter asks:
On what day of the term was Brown v. Board of Education released? This would […]

Justice Kennedy’s majority in Kennedy v. Louisiana is an interesting, albeit frustrating one. He sets out to splatter every argument he can against the wall in the hopes that at least a few will stick. Whether or not he succeeds is up to the reader and more importantly, future generations of Supreme Court Justices who […]

The Supreme Court today handed down a series opinions on the penultimate day of the term. Major thanks should go to SCOTUSblog for getting these opinions online minutes after the Court announces them. I’ll eventually change the links to redirect to the Supreme Court’s website, but thanks go to SCOTUSblog for letting us read the […]

The Court is widely expected to hand down the remaining seven opinions from this term today and either tomorrow or Monday. Among the cases to watch are Kennedy v. Louisiana (death penalty for child rape) and DC v. Heller (DC Gun ban.)
Justice Scalia is the only Justice remaining from the March sitting who has […]

The Court is likely to release quite a few cases this week. There are 10 cases left in the term and the Court will release a few today and more on Wednesday or Thursday.
In case you had noticed, I am in the process of preparing the Term Case Index for the end of the term. […]

The Supreme Court’s landmark public use decision Kelo v. City of New London was handed down three years ago today. On June 23, 2005, Justices Stevens handed down an opinion that held that “there is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose.” Justices Kennedy, Souter, Breyer, and Ginsburg […]

The Supreme Court released five opinions today, the most interesting of which is the decision in Boumediene v. Bush, the landmark detainee right’s case. The Court held, 5-4, that detainees currently designated as ‘enemy combatants’ have signficant habeus corpus rights and have the right to have them upheld in federal district court.
I’m reading this […]

The next few weeks are sure to be busy ones on the Court. The Court has an astonishing 26 cases left on its docket and all of those will receive an opinion before the end of June. Last year the Court released 22 cases in the same period (second through fourth weeks in June.) The […]

Justice O’Connor presented at a gamer’s conference and talked about her new game, Our Courts. Check it out here at Wired’s GameLife blog:
That’s why, O’Connor said, she wanted to work alongside University of Wisconsin-Madison professor James Paul Gee to create Our Courts, which will begin rolling out in September 2009.
The game “lets students engage in […]