DailyWrit

I’ve been a little surprised by how scarcely the Supreme Court is being mentioned during this election cycle. Especially as the dust was settling from Heller, I expected more talk about the role our next president may play in determining the trajectory of the Court. Recently, however, I’ve noticed that some smaller conservative blogs have […]

Justice Kennedy’s streak of being in the majority in 5-4 decisions has been snapped today with his dissenting vote (and opinion) in Ali v. Federal Bureau of Prisions.
Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion and was joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Ginsburg. Justice Kennedy penned a dissent that was joined by […]

Oral Arguments took place this morning in Boumediene v. Bush and its sister case, Al-Odah v. US. Because of the heightened interest in the case, the Supreme Court opted to expedite the delivery of the audio recording and it was broadcast on C-Span by 11:50EST, less than an hour after the arguments concluded.
The arguments went […]

After finding the most talkative Justice, I was interested in finding the funniest Justice. According to my calculations, there were 51 total references to (Laughter.) in the court’s first two months of arguements. Here is the breakdown:

Case
JR
JPS
AS
AK
DS
CT
RBG
SB
SA
COUNSEL
TOTAL

Washington
1

2
3

Tom F.

0

Gall

1

2
3

Kimbrough

1

1

2

Torres
3

1

4

Santos

1

1

Watson

1
1

1

3

Stoneridge

1

1

Medellin

1
1

1

3

Klein

0

Ali

1

1

Williams

1

1

1
3

Logan

0

Danforth
1
2
3

6

CSX

2

1

3

Davis
2
1
1

1

1

6

John R.
1
1
1

1
4

Fed. Ex.

4

1
5

Hall

1
1

1
3

TOTAL
8
6
17
2
4
0
0
5
1
8
51

No surprises here. Scalia talks almost twice as much as everyone else. […]

Two months into the term, the Supreme Court has held oral arguments in 19 different cases. After reading a few of the transcripts, I thought it would be interesting to see which Justices spoke most often during oral arguments.
I found transcripts from the usual place and I copied the text into TextMate. From there, I […]

The Petitioner’s Briefs have been submitted in Al-Odah v. US and Boumediene v. Bush, the two high-profile detainee cases that the court has accepted for review. Thanks to SCOTUSblog, everyone can access the Al-Odah briefs here (Al-Odah) and here (El-Banna) and the Boumediene brief here. I’ll use Al-Odah for the majority of my analysis but […]

I’m trying my very hardest to leave the political blogging to the plebs but its getting harder and harder as we get farther away from the term. Regardless, there are still a few important topics of the 2006 term that haven’t been discussed. I wrote a bit about the politics inside the court that have […]

I’m already getting pumped for the October 2007 Term. On Friday, the court issued its final orders for the semester and they decided to hear Boumediene v. Bush and its otherwise-unimportant sister-case Al Odah v. US. One of my first posts, back on April 3, discussed the rejection of Boumediene’s petition for trial. Justices Stevens […]

All of the law blogs on the internet are exploding with analysis about how the 2006 term is the sign of a major revolution in Constitutional Theory that will undo a lot of the moderate-conservative work of the Rhenquist Court (1985-2005). Balkanization, SCOTUSblog, The New York Times here and here, Washington Post, Prawfsblawg, Georgetown […]

The court’s last cases are being handed down as I type this. The conservative block of the court wins the Leegin, a case revolving around vertical integration and pricing laws. The court’s liberal block won a death penalty case that now upholds laws that restrict the use of the death penalty on people who have […]

Jeffrey Rosen has written a scathing critique of Anthony Kennedy in the latest issue of the The New Republic. He claims that “Anthony Kennedy seems most at home when he is lecturing others about morality.”
Here are some interesting excerpts:
The grandiosity of Kennedy’s self-image was on full display in a 2005 interview he gave to the […]

Ever since Harper’s Weekly started charging for access to their monthly index, I’ve been deprived of news by numbers. Now that I’ve finished my index(!), I think its as good a time as any to do some analysis. Try to follow along:
Number of Opinions handed down by this point last year: 52
Number of Opinions handed […]

I tried desperately yesterday to find something worth blogging about but my searches were all in vain. Today, however, the Court’s ruling in three death penalty cases is just asking to be blogged about.
In Smith v. Texas, the Court, in an opinion written by the ever-swinging Justice Kennedy, held that Texas’s Court of Criminal Appeals […]

Now that the dust has finally settled on the Court’s ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart, Feminists are understandably upset and conservative groups are cautiously elated. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of opinions from around the blogosphere have come down with decidedly partisan terms. Feministing got mad at ‘anti-choicers’ while RedState called out ‘advocates of infanticide.’ […]

The Court’s decision today to uphold a “partial birth abortion” ban in Gonzalez v. Carhart has been 21-years in the making. Regan-ites Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy joined forces with Thomas, Alito, and the Chief Justice to combat the forces of liberalism that are ever-present in our society. Conservatives have to be pleased with Justices […]