Many dissents and powerful ones. That is what we are inevitably going to see at the end of the Supreme Court term as the justices tend to have strong views when dealing with such hot-button issues as those on the Court’s plate. We have many examples of this from the past. One is Rucho v….
Month: May 2022
Martinez-Ramirez and the Direction of 6th Amendment Rights
Most of the Supreme Court discussion today is focused on the Shinn v. Martinez-Ramirez case which narrowed the room for criminal defendants to plead ineffective assistance of counsel under the 6th Amendment. It did so by holding that when an attorney at a post-conviction hearing does not raise a claim of ineffective counsel at trial,…
SCOTUS Housekeeping
Since we’re nearing June and The Supreme Court term is slated to end on June 27th, I’ve been thinking lately about what the Court has left to do before then. Actually, there’s quite a bit of work to do. First, there are big decisions – the Dobbs abortion case, NY Rifle gun decision, Kennedy v….
Scalito
Justice Alito is often compared to Justice Scalia in his level of conservativism. In my opinion there are some significant differences between the two. A recent piece by Aziz Huq in Politico describes, “[Alito’s] early, subtly disparaging nickname, ‘Scalito,’ suggests he is a mere mini-me clone of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.” The data show…
Was it Ever Really Roberts’ Court?
It has been a long two weeks for the Supreme Court. Since the leak of Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, several of the Supreme Court Justices have come forward offering their thoughts on the leak. According to the Washington Post, “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called the leak ‘absolutely appalling.’ The Supreme…
The Justice Behind the Dobbs Draft Opinion
Justice Alito, one of two Supreme Court nominees by President George W. Bush, has turned out to be one of the most certain conservative votes on the Court. Alito’s draft majority opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson was released by Politico last week shining a spotlight on the very real possibility that the Court will overturn…
Week of 4/25/2022 In Review
(1) The week began with a few statistical takeaways from the Bremerton oral arguments: Justice Kavanaugh spoke the most followed by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor. CJ Roberts spoke least overall. Justice Alito only spoke during Respondent’s turn and Justices Kagan and Sotomayor only spoke during Petitioner’s turn. If we focus on the polarity or positive/negative…
Empirical SCOTUS 