The Associated Press is reporting that Justice Stevens has confirmed that he has hired only one clerk for OT10. Typically, Stevens hires all of his clerks at one time during the summer a year before their term begins.
As always, its hard to read too much into this. Is it possible that this was a good [...]

Judge Sotomayor’s frequent encounters with major league sports are well-documented. She also grew up near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and is a life-long fan of the Yankees.
Justice Stevens, the Court’s longest-serving member, is a long-time fan of another famous baseball team: the Chicago. He was present at the game at Wrigley Field in 1932 [...]

The Supreme Court handed down an opinion today in Wyeth v. Levine (here).

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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 and opinion: 121

The Court revisited the always familiar issue of pre-emption [...]

(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 [...]

The future is bleak for democrats and judicial liberals. The average age of the four conservatives is 60.75 years (Roberts(53), Scalia (72), Thomas(60), Alito(58)). The average age of the four liberals, however, is 75.7 years (Stevens(88), Souter(69), Ginsburg(75), Breyer(70)). Justice Stevens, an active octogenarian and avid tennis player who frequently reads briefs on the beach [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role clerks play and how they influence the way cases are accepted and decided. Obviously they play a huge role in Cert. Pool (which Justices Stevens and Alito forgo) as well as writing the opinions once they are ready to be distributed.
In today’s order’s list (here), [...]

Earlier tonight, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama joined Pastor Rick Warren at his California megachurch for an event pegged as “The Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency.” The interviews, each an hour in length, were separated by thirty-six tense seconds in which the presumptive nominees shared the stage (and an awkward hug [video here!]). [...]