There has been a lot of talk about naming Diane Wood of the Seventh Circuit to replace Justice Souter when he leaves the Court. Full Name: Diane Pamela Wood DOB: July 4, 1950 Age: 58 Undergraduate: University of Texas ‘71 Law School: University of Texas ‘75 Notable Work Experiences: Clerk- Irving Goldberg (CA5 ’76), Harry [...]

The AP wire is reporting on a possible nominees to replace Justice Souter. Most news sources are reporting that President Obama will nominate a woman. He is also under considerable pressure to nominate a minority candidate, and there are only a handful of nominees to meet both of those criteria. Here is the AP list [...]

Several sources are reporting that Justice Souter will retire at the end of the term (NBC here). It isn’t terribly surprising, ATL had been reporting that he hasn’t hired terms for OT09 and UTR reported on a clandestine meeting between Justice Souter and Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Assuming that the [...]

I’ve updated the Term Case Index to reflect the four opinions handed down this week. Earlier today I released opinion authorship statistics sorted by month. You can find the Term Index here and the authorship data here.

Today was the final day for arguments during OT08 and the Court heard arguments in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder. You can find the transcript here. The arguments made were certainly very interesting. Justice Scalia, while criticizing the near-unanimity with which Congress passed the VRA extension, made this observation: You know, [...]

Andrew Frey’s biography on the Mayer Brown website says “He has argued 64 cases in the US Supreme Court, more than any other lawyer currently in private practice.” Well, Carter Phillips of Sidley Austin has been creeping up for some time now and finally beat him when he argued for the respondents in Gross v. [...]

C-SPAN is now streaming the audio from oral arguments on their website. Link here. My initial thoughts: the Justices are very, very skeptical of Section 5.

I’ve created a table to shows which opinions have been thus far released in the term based on sitting and majority author. You can find the table here. You can find the .xls data here and the .numbers statistics here. It’s hard to make too many predictions right now. Justice Kennedy will likely write the [...]

The Supreme Court today decided FCC v. Fox in favor of allowing the FCC to punish broadcasters for even single utterances of explicit language. The opinion can be found

Justices Thomas and Breyer went to Capitol Hill on Thursday last week to discuss their budget for next year. AP has a good recap of the event here. The highlight for myself and many other Court-watchers was the requested $800,000 for updates to the Supreme Court website. The Court’s website hasn’t changed substantially since it [...]