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Author: Adam Chandler

By on Nov 12, 2009 at 9:33 am
Obituaries for John J. O’Connor, III, the husband of retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, are in today’s newspapers.  O’Connor died yesterday, at age 79, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.  For obituaries, see The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press (via The Wall Street Journal).  Memorial services will be private. After the jump, a new diversion for Supreme Court buffs.

By on Nov 5, 2009 at 10:32 am
Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs is hosting a panel discussion next Wednesday titled “Full Court Press: The Supreme Court, the Media and Public Understanding.”  The program will focus on issues of public understanding of the Court raised by Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation process over the summer.  The panel will feature Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, Adam Liptak of The New York Times, and Jeffrey Toobin of CNN. Coverage of yesterday’s arguments in Pottawattamie County v. McGhee and Wood v. Allen appears after the jump.

By on Oct 29, 2009 at 10:21 am
Joan Biskupic will discuss her new biography of Justice Scalia, American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Wednesday, November 18.  Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal will moderate.  Biskupic is the Supreme Court correspondent for USA Today and also authored a biography of Sandra Day O’Connor.  Details on the event are available here. Updates on the living legacies of Iqbal, Caperton, Medtronic, and Heller appear after the jump.

By on Sep 27, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Even before the Justices have decided whether to hear a case, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is willing to step in and state its interest—more willing, in fact, than any other organization. A review of certiorari-stage amicus curiae briefs (i.e., amicus briefs filed at the petition stage, before the Justices grant cert.) filed between May 19, 2004 and August 15, 2007 shows that the Chamber of Commerce filed 55 such briefs, about 17 per year. Over the three-and-a-quarter years studied, 986 parties filed cert.-stage amicus briefs, averaging 1.666 briefs per party. Of those 986 amici, 259 filed 2 or more, and 118 filed 3 or more. Not every party was included in the count, as we were most interested in the impact of private groups and advocacy organizations pushing cert. petitions; those excluded from the count are listed at the bottom of this post. The top sixteen parties each filed 8 or more briefs, and a list of those groups, along with the success rates of the cases in which they filed (up to Tuesday's orders list), is here. The success rate is calculated as a percentage of the party-supported petitions that were either granted or denied. (Note that only amicus briefs in support of a petition are considered here; the Washington Legal Foundation filed as an amicus in opposition to the petition in Padilla v. Hanft (05-533) and was not counted in that instance.) Petitions supported by these top sixteen groups included many of the Court's most high-profile cases over the last few years, such as US v. Booker, MGM v. Grokster, PICS v. Seattle Schools, and Rumsfeld v. FAIR. Notably, the list of top amici is dominated by pro-business and anti-regulatory groups—such groups hold over half the slots in the top sixteen. The prevalence of these groups may result from their having an enhanced financial ability to pay for many cert.-stage briefs as compared to other groups; the businesses and industries they comprise and represent may also be more eager to jump in at the petition stage when their bottom lines are at stake (as opposed to an ideological group); and it's possible, too, that these groups want to get as many cases as they can before a Supreme Court that is being increasingly viewed as business-friendly (e.g., see here). As a corollary, the absence of liberal or left-leaning groups is striking (with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as a narrowly-focused exception). The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, tallied just two cert.-stage amicus briefs during this time. A full quarter of the sweet sixteen are regionally-named legal foundations. Ranking third, fourth, seventh, and eighth overall in numbers of cert.-stage amicus briefs filed, the Washington Legal Foundation filed 26 briefs, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed 25, the New England Legal Foundation filed 11, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation filed 10. Their success rates were relatively high, ranging from about 18% (New England) to 39% (Washington). The Washington Legal Foundation, in fact, edged out the National Association of Home Builders (36%) to have the highest grant percentage of the top sixteen. The only two groups in the top sixteen to be completely shut out were the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (9 briefs in cases denied cert.) and the Society of Professional Journalists (8 briefs). Additionally, the Associated Press filed seven cert.-stage amicus briefs in cases that were all denied. These three groups, along with many other media organizations, often file amicus briefs together, so these are not 24 distinct denials, but rather just nine. Even so, since May 2004, these media groups hold the distinction of putting the most effort into pushing petitions while having no success.

By on Sep 22, 2007 at 1:13 pm
This is the third post previewing petitions for certiorari to be considered at the Justices’ Long Conference on Monday, September 24. Each was also listed in the Petitions to Watch post here. The preview of Gilles v. Blanchard (06-1617) is here, and the preview of Catholic Charities v. Dinallo (06-1550) is here. This post will examine Koutnik v. Brown, et al. (06-1171), a case involving the censorship of a prisoner’s outgoing mail. The petition, brief in opposition (BIO), and reply for Koutnik are respectively available here, here, and here. The petition presents two questions: first, what the correct First Amendment standard of review is when applied to censorship of prisoner mail; and second, whether censorship by prison officials on general rehabilitative grounds violates the First Amendment. Joseph D. Koutnik, as an inmate at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, attempted to send a letter and some drawings from prison in December 2002. The mail was addressed to Northern Sun Merchandising, a retail catalog selling items like T-shirts and posters featuring political messages. In his cover letter, Koutnik noted that prison reform messages were not well-represented among Northern Sun’s products, so he urged the company to use some of his ideas. As the petition describes it, “[o]ne of Mr. Koutnik’s drawings was a cartoon swastika filled with prison bars, with the captions, ‘Department of Corruptions’ and ‘Keeping Kids in Kages.’” The respondents emphasize that the caption to the swastika included three “prominent, stylized” Ks, a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. The BIO also points out that Koutnik’s letter expressed a wish for Northern Sun to market prison reform-themed products to inmates. Prison officers confiscated and destroyed Koutnik’s mail and notified him as such. The BIO explains that seizing Koutnik’s mail was “related to the penological goal of rehabilitation” because the prison needed to encourage Koutnik to “live crime-free upon release[,] … to develop the ability to solve conflicts without resorting to violence[, and] to recognize that successful integration into society requires respecting the rights of others.” Koutnik brought a pro se suit alleging breaches of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. He claimed that the swastika drawing was a political statement comparing the prison system to Nazi concentration camps. He also denied that he was promoting white supremacist views, and that “as a person of Slavic descent, he abhors Nazis,” according to the petition. The BIO counters that Koutnik is a member of the Simon City Royals, a “usually white” gang. The District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin granted summary judgment in favor of the prison officials, and in August 2006, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed. Koutnik then obtained pro bono representation to petition for rehearing and now for certiorari.

By on Sep 7, 2007 at 9:40 am
This is the first in a series of posts previewing petitions for certiorari to be considered at the Justices’ Long Conference on September 24. Each will also be listed in the Petitions to Watch post before that conference. In this post, we’ll look at Gilles v. Blanchard, et al. (06-1617), a case involving religious speech on a public university campus. The petition, brief in opposition (BIO), and reply for Gilles are respectively available here, here, and here. The petition presents two questions: first, whether an open area on a public university’s campus should be considered a public forum for speech purposes; and second, whether campus officials can exercise “unbridled discretion” in regulating speech on public university property, even if the speech occurs in a nonpublic forum. Since the early 1980s, James Gilles, a preacher informally known as “Brother Jim,” has spoken and distributed Christian literature on hundreds of college campuses around the country. According to Gilles’s petition, he visited Vincennes University, a public university in Indiana, in August 2002 in an attempt to discuss “faith and other moral issues of the day” in “an open and accessible part of the campus resembling a sidewalk and public park.” A campus security officer stopped Gilles’ presentation and informed him that he would have to submit a “Request for Solicitation Approval” form to the dean of students. The dean deemed Gilles’s speech solicitation, meaning that Gilles could only speak in the area designated on campus for solicitation: a brick walkway in front of the student union “adjacent to a public street at a three-way intersection,” according to the petition. Due to noise and little student traffic in the designated area, Gilles ultimately decided to leave the campus. He brought suit in mid-2004. The district court granted the university’s motion for summary judgment, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed in February.