Justice Kagan and Miguel Estrada have had a long relationship that has confounded and surprised many of their skeptics. At Kagan’s confirmation hearing, Estrada waxed poetic about her abilities and good humor while Kagan volunteered that Estrada was “qualified to sit as a Supreme Court Justice.” They first met at Harvard Law School when they [...]

In the past, we’ve profiled notable advocates and judges that were in the news. This is the first in a series of posts about the advocates who will be arguing in the Healthcare Cases. On November 18, the Supreme Court invited H. Bartow Farr to brief and argue an important point of law in the [...]

Former Solicitor General Gregory Garre is scheduled to argue twice during the December sitting, a relatively uncommon feat for private practice lawyers. He will argue in both Mims v. Arrow Financial Services on November 28 and PPL Montana, LLC v. Montana on December 7. This will be Garre’s second time arguing twice during a given [...]

Over at Opinio Juris, Harlan Cohen makes the compelling argument that the current “customary international law” paradigm of the Alien Tort Statute is a poor fit for the statute, particularly in light of recent cases. He’s right: trying to divine whether international custom supports aiding and abetting liability or corporate liability is, frankly, silly. It [...]

The Supreme Court’s decision last week to appoint H. Bartow Farr and Robert Long to argue in the ACA cases follows in a long tradition of appointing amici to support positions that might not otherwise receive representation at the merits stage. But should positions themselves receive representation? Earlier this year the Stanford Law Review published [...]

Justice Sotomayor has completed two years on the Supreme Court and, as she begins her third, it seems like an appropriate time to take an initial look at whether or not she has turned out to be as predictably liberal as her supporters had hoped or as her opponents had feared. During her nomination, most [...]

I’ve made some cosmetic changes to the site. Please let me know if you have trouble seeing anything or if the page doesn’t load properly. In a somewhat controversial move, I’ve expanded the page width to 1080 pixels. The new changes should put the most important information front and center. I’ve also added new social [...]

Several commentators have provided their thoughts on why the Supreme Court granted 5.5 hours of oral argument in the the ACA cases. Over at Just Enrichment, Joshua Matz hypothesizes that the decision was made for show, or to simply signal to the public that the Supreme Court was giving this case the utmost respect. At [...]

While browsing the C-SPAN archives for interesting vidoes, I ran across a great one from 1989. The video features Tim O’Brien providing a recap of October Term 1988, which happened to be Justice Kennedy’s first year on the Court. I can’t embed the video, but you can find it here. There are a few interesting [...]

The NLJ recently released their “Minority 40 Under 40” list of the top 40 minority lawyers under the age of 40. Its a fairly arbitrary marker of lawyerly accomplishment, but the NLJ clearly knows how much lawyers love lists. A few Supreme Court litigators make the list. Leondra Kruger – Assistant to the Solicitor general [...]