DailyWrit

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!]). […]

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 Stephen Breyer has taken part in a groundbreaking new online forum that was launched today, BigThink.com. The site finds ‘experts’ in various fields and invites them to give candid interviews on a variety of topics. For a more indepth look, check out an article from the New York Times here.
Justice Breyer has always been […]

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 […]

C-Span followed Clarence Thomas around his book release party at the home of Armstrong Williams. Its a rather amusing video with cameos from David Souter, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, the ever-lovely Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Arlen Specter, Lindsey Graham, Dick Cheney and a plethora of mid-major political stars and their spouses. Here […]

In a debate between Justices Scalia and Breyer that took place almost a 9 months ago, both Justices declared that they were more concerned with establishing broad precedence than reaching a sound conclusion in a single case. Here are the comments from the Justices:

Scalia: I don’t much care about your particular case. I am not […]

RedState.com is probably the most legit conservative blog on the ‘net, placing them in a position of legitimacy just above Tom Delay’s Blog and below PerezHilton.com. As a conservative blog, it should surprise no one that they aren’t huge fans of Justice Breyer or any members of the liberal block. Now that conservatives been winning […]

Apparently Arlen Specter isn’t particularly happy with the recent Stare Decisis-related performances of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. I’m not exactly sure what he wants to do about it, but it looks like he just wants to take a look at past decisions and remarks from the two Justices and decide whether or not […]

Bill Posner (not Richard Posner) writes a rather interesting article about the now infamous banner at the center of Morse v. Fredrick over at his blog, Language Log. Posner contends that the Justices, especially the conservative ones, may have overanalyzed the banner in question by ignoring “the possibility that the utterance is meaningless.” By assuming […]

Sources all of the ‘net have been citing the number of 5-4 cases as ‘24.’ The problem with that, however, is that only 21 cases were decided on a 5-4 vote. If you take a look at the articles that I listed in my last post (here), nearly all of them suggest that 24 […]