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Let’s face it, for the most part things at the SCOTUS have gotten rather tedious. But Brown represents a possible departure from the norm. A strange grant. There were only two indications that there was any SCOTUS interest at all – a) the government was the Petitioner; and b) and there was one, just one relist – before cert was granted. More importantly, it’s an interesting grant. What is SCOTUS actually up to here? Why…
Odd that we missed this one. An actual habeas case. And today, the SCOTUS took it up. What is the scintillating issue the Justices seized upon, committing all manner of “judicial resources” to resolve it? Issue: Whether a federal habeas court may grant relief based solely on its conclusion that the test from Brecht v. Abrahamson is satisfied, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit held, or whether the court must…
It’s a misnomer, of course. The SCOTUS doesn’t sizzle. We mean it only to suggest that the last week has seen a certain SCOTUS bent towards what might be termed trendy issues. We’re not sure how “trendy” is defined here. But let’s take a look at two examples and see how it pans out in context. The first is the NCAA anti-trust argument that took place Tuesday. We’re of the opinion that if you applied…
The SCOTUS doesn’t do it. Except when it does. And when is that? When some poor schmuck gets relief on habeas corpus in a federal court. The SCOTUS has been, and remains, anxious to overturn any such ruling. And it just did so again this morning. 8-1 vote. Sotomayor dissents but doesn’t say anything. It is quite a remarkable thing, really. Breath taking, this long standing SCOTUS penchant to eradicate the Great Writ in…
So back in December we wrote about a case the SCOTUS took up, lamenting the waste of time and resources thrown at the issue and asserting our view that the Petitioners benefit from SCOTUS snobbery. The case will be argued on Monday. It gets attention not from the mainstream press, which is preoccupied with 78 year old President Biden’t first news conference and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; but rather from the specialized legal profession…
And, as usual, we don’t really understand why. It’s a death penalty case. But so what? It’s a case we’ve offered our opinion on before. But so what? Is the SCOTUS really going to reach down to the District Court and decide that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev gets the needle? We hope not. Why does the SCOTUS take any death penalty cases? They’re so rare they’re all one-offs, really. What are the “of general importance” questions…
We read this recently from an old internet colleague: The remedy for bad speech, they say, is more speech. Counter negative speech with positive speech: it’s very rational. And the right answer to bad speech would indeed be the rational answer—more speech—if it were only the literal meaning of the words that mattered. If, that is, we were calculating rational beings. But we are not. Instead of calculating rational beings, humans are feeling beings. Speech’s effects on us pass far beyond…
Seems there’s more than a little distance between what a prosecutor thinks and what an independent practitioner thinks about what the “duty of loyalty” is. Had an exchange with a prosecutor on FB about our previous post. It started with his rather harsh and of course entirely misplaced criticism of our post. How dare he: That’s basically an angry opinion piece. And it calls flipping an important witness in a criminal investigation “facilitating the…