Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about the healthcare reform bill that will be signed into law in the coming days. A more interesting question, and one more relevant to this blog, is what effect its passage might have on a potential Supreme Court vacancy this summer. Because of his victory yesterday, the President [...]

President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter is the type of decision we have come to expect from the Obama administration. It involved important political considerations and will likely prove to be good enough for liberals but not off-putting for conservatives. Let me start off with the assumption that she [...]

President Obama gave the commencement speech at Notre Dame earlier today and spoke primarily about abortion and other social issues. You can find a full recap from the New York Times here. I don’t ordinarily take note of political speeches coming from the White House, but I have to think about whether or not the [...]

The Court will be holding conference for the next seven consecutive Thursdays (as opposed to the normal friday conference meeting). We will likely see at least a few opinions and accepted cases every week from now until the Court breaks at the end of June. In the short-term, the Court’s opinion hotline also tells us [...]

The Supreme Court will discuss whether or not to continue the case of al-Marri during conference on Friday, March 6, according to the Supreme Court’s docket sheet. Among other things, Al-Marri charges that his detention without formal charges represents an unconstitutional breach of habeus corpus. Last week, the Obama administration formally charged Al-Marri and motioned [...]

Politico has an article up this week about “the birthers,” a fringe group that challenges the validity of Obama’s ascendency to the presidency on the alleged basis that he was born outside the United States. Such a claim, if true, would render him constitutionally ineligible for office pursuant to Article II, Section I, Clause IV. [...]

It now appears as though the much-anticipated case al-Marri v. Spagone (08-368) won’t be heard by the Supreme Court. al-Marri has gotten a taste of some change he can believe in, courtesy of the Obama administration. The United States Circuit Court for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled en banc last June that [...]

There isn’t much to be said about today’s flubbed oath that hasn’t been said already. Jan Crawford Greenburg points out that an oath of office flub isn’t unprecedented: It’s worth pointing out that Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who had been President himself, also flubbed the oath when he was swearing in Herbert Hoover in [...]

Professor Peter Black reported yesterday on his blog that a judge in Colorado approved the use of twitter updates by journalists in his courtroom. The judge found that liveblogging a case is no different from newspaper reports and should therefore be treated the same way. The journalist’s twitter is here. Also of note, Dr. Sanjay [...]

Barack Obama has announced that he will appoint Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagen to be his Solicitor General. The two taught together at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s, and before that she clerked for Abner Mikva on the DC Circuit and Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. She clerked for Marshall [...]