Event announcement: ABA and American University to host “On the Docket: Looking at the New Supreme Court Term” On Thursday, Oct. 1, at 12 p.m. EDT, the American Bar Association Public Education Division and the Program on Law & Government at American University Washington College of Law will co-host a virtual briefing of the upcoming Supreme Court term. After welcome remarks by ABA President Patricia Lee Refo, WCL professor and SCOTUSblog contributor Steve Wermiel will moderate the panel discussion among Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, former U.S. Solicitor General Greg Garre, Kimberly Atkins of the Boston Globe and WCL professor Cynthia Jones. Click here for more info and to register.

Wednesday round-up The Supreme Court — and President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett — were the subject of the first segment of Tuesday night’s chaotic presidential debate. Trump reiterated his pledge to fill the court’s vacancy before Election Day, while Democrat Joe Biden said the seat should not be filled until after Americans express their views in the election. USA Today’s Richard Wolf recounts the debate segment. Continue reading »

Case preview: In newest chapter in long-running water dispute, court will hear first-ever challenge to ruling by interstate river master Texas v. New Mexico is a new dispute in an old Supreme Court proceeding, first filed in 1974 but, until recently, dormant since the early 1990s. The litigation involves the Pecos River, the waters of which are apportioned between New Mexico and Texas under the Pecos River Compact, approved by Congress in 1949. Earlier decisions in this case established key principles for litigation of interstate water disputes, helping define the court’s approach to interpreting and enforcing water allocation compacts. This latest installment — which will be argued on Oct. 5, the first day of the court’s 2020-21 term — figures to be far less consequential. It is an accounting dispute over a one-time event that took place from 2014 to 2015, involving temporary storage of floodwaters in a federal reservoir. As a challenge to a decision by the court-appointed river master, the case is a procedural oddity, seemingly a first in the history of interstate water lawsuits that fall within the court’s “original jurisdiction.” The unique nature of the dispute makes it unlikely to set important precedent beyond the Pecos Basin. Continue reading »

“What would Ruth do?”: A feminist pioneer on what Justice Ginsburg meant to her This tribute is the last in a series on the life and work of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, political activist and feminist organizer. Because Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I are pretty much age peers, I think that I have some perspective on this extraordinary woman long before she became known to many of us as the Notorious RBG – and long before she ended the gender divide that had been the norm in Supreme Court rulings. Ruth and I got to know each other decades ago when she was creating the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. From the onset, she was clear that reproductive freedom included the right to have, as well as not to have, children. I say this now because much has been said about Ruth’s support for women’s right to a safe and legal abortion, but less about her belief that reproductive justice must also include the right to bear children. At that time, some Black women were being sterilized by economic coercion or legal conditions of state aid. Sterilization of poor Black women had become a practice so common that it was sometimes called “a Mississippi appendectomy.” Yet white women often had to have two or more children, plus their husbands’ written permission, before a doctor would perform a tubal ligation that freed them from the dangers of multiple pregnancies or artificial birth control. What could be more clearly racist than that? Continue reading »

Pennsylvania GOP leaders ask justices to block order on counting absentee ballots after Election Day (updated) Telling the Supreme Court that there is a “very real possibility that the final presidential election results” could rest on the outcome of voting in Pennsylvania, Republicans in the state asked the justices on Monday to block a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that would require election officials to count absentee ballots received within three days after Election Day, Nov. 3, even if they are not postmarked. Without intervention from the justices, the Republican leaders in the state legislature warned, the Pennsylvania court’s ruling “could destroy the American public’s confidence in the election system as a whole.” Continue reading »

October Term 2020 and the specter of (a lot of) mootness Recent discussions of the Supreme Court’s upcoming term have understandably focused on the implications of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and the seemingly inevitable confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed her. At least some of that commentary, in turn, has raised the possibility of the court being called upon to potentially resolve the presidential election, or at least high-profile cases relating to it. But the election looms over the upcoming term in at least one other (less sensational) respect: the number of cases that could potentially be mooted before they are decided, especially if there’s a change in administrations come January 2021. Indeed, although mootness is always a possibility during terms featuring presidential transitions, there are more disputes with potential mootness problems in the pipeline for the upcoming term than was true four years ago (when no granted cases were mooted by the shift in administrations). Thus, with the justices set to add cases to their docket in the coming weeks, including after Tuesday’s long conference, one possibility is for the court to be strategic not just in which cases it grants and when, but in how it schedules arguments in these cases — perhaps setting some of the potentially moot-able disputes for arguments in March and April rather than January and February. At the very least, the specter of mootness helps to underscore how something as mundane as when a case is scheduled for argument can sometimes have substantive implications. Continue reading »

Who is Amy Coney Barrett? Who is Judge Amy Coney Barrett and what’s next for her confirmation battle? Amy Howe answers these questions and more on this week’s episode of SCOTUStalk. Amy sits down with SCOTUSblog media editor Katie Barlow to discuss the significance of President Donald Trump’s third nomination to the court, what the truncated confirmation timeline will be like, and what hot-button issues she would face as the court’s newest justice. Listen on Acast | Spotify The full transcript is below. Continue reading »

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