Today, February 22, 2010, marks the four-year anniversary of the last time Justice Thomas asked a question during oral arguments. His silence from the bench is well-document and has been discussed by commentators (including myself) quite a bit. Today, Tony Mauro has a few interesting tidbits to add in his article in the NLJ. I [...]

While I will readily accept that my end-of-term comments are even less relevant than usual because they are so belligerently late, I still think I have a few interesting things to point out about the nearly-finished term. First, and least controversially, Justice Kennedy still controls an important position in the middle of the Court. Justice [...]

The Supreme Court released four divided opinions today including a very interesting case rejecting an inmate’s right to test the DNA used to convict him more than 15 years ago. Justice Thomas was the author of another 5-4 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services. For some reason, I had always assumed that he filed [...]

The Supreme Court handed down an opinion today in Wyeth v. Levine (here). (29) Wyeth v. Levine Docket Filing | Questions Presented Case Number: 06-1249 On Appeal From: SC-VT Date Argued: November 3, 2008 Date Decided: March 4, 2009 6-3; Affirmed Majority: Stevens(m), Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer(c), Thomas(c) Dissent: Alito(d), Roberts, Scalia Days between argument [...]

(Nearly) every majority opinion features a short introduction before it jumps into the standard I, II, III, IV, etc structure. Some Justices simply introduce the facts very briefly (Scalia), while others discuss the procedural history (Thomas), and others discuss the underlying issue in the case (Souter.) I took a look at all of the cases [...]

The use footnotes has been a topic of quiet conversation around the judiciary for some time now. One group of Judges and practitioners (and an even larger percentage of students) find them to be burdensome and often unnecessary. Others think they serve as useful guides and make opinions more readable. Footnotes largely come in two [...]

Once again, I’ve conjured up some charts marking how often each Justice spoke during oral arguments in the first half of the term. You can find a detailed look into my methodology here but to summarize, these numbers represent the number of times ‘JUSTICE ______’ is mentioned in the oral argument transcripts posted on the [...]

Over the course of the past week, both the blogosphere and mainstream media have been spending quite a bit of time over at the Supreme Court rumor mill. There has been a lot of buzz about two cases concerned with president-elect Obama’s citizenship, Donofrio v. Wells (08A407) and Wrotnowski v. Bysiewicz (08A469). The applications for [...]

The Supreme Court appears to have declined review in a case filed against the Secretary of State of New Jersey that sought to nullify Barack Obama’s election to the presidency. The case, which centers on Obama’s citizenship, was not among those for which the Court accepted review on Friday; thus, watchers of the high Court [...]

On Monday the court denied review in Walker v. Georgia, a case revolving around the court’s proportionality standard applied to the death penalty. The court has long struggled to find an adequate means of countering racist bias within the capital system and there is little doubt that the issue will rear its ahead again in [...]