The Court issued one opinion today in an argued case, described in greater detail in Lyle’s post here.
The case is No. 05-502, Brigham City v. Stuart, in which the Court reversed and remanded the judgment of the Utah Supreme Court in a unanimous opinion by the Chief Justice.
Justice Stevens filed a concurrence that begins with these intriguing paragraphs:
This is an odd flyspeck of a case. The charges that have been pending against respondents for the past six years are minor offenses-intoxication, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and disorderly conduct-two of which could have been proved by evidence that was gathered by the responding officers before they entered the home. The maximum punishment for these crimes ranges between 90 days and 6 months in jail. And the Court’s unanimous opinion restating well-settled rules of federal law is so clearly persuasive that it is hard to imagine the outcome was ever in doubt.Under these circumstances, the only difficult question is which of the following is the most peculiar: (1) that the Utah trial judge, the intermediate state appellate court, and the Utah Supreme Court all found a Fourth Amendment violation on these facts; (2) that the prosecution chose to pursue this matter all the way to the United States Supreme Court; or (3) that this Court voted to grant the petition for a writ of certiorari.
Here is today’s Orders List, which Lyle discussed in greater detail here. The Court invited the Solicitor General to file a brief expressing the views of the United States in No. 05-1284, Watson v. Philip Morris Cos., in which the question presented by the petition is whether a private actor doing no more than complying with federal regulation is a “person acting under a federal officer” for the purpose of 28 U.S.C. § 1442(a)(1), entitling the actor to remove to federal court a civil action brought in state court under state law.
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