At the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Pulse blog, Lawrence Ebner wonders, “given the unusual alignment of Justices” in Ramos v. Louisiana, in which a fractured court ruled on Monday that the Constitution requires a unanimous jury verdict in state criminal trials, “whether the Court’s application of stare decisis is truly principled, or whether it is just a case-by-case, result-driven expedient for saving or ditching a controversial, and even wrongly decided, precedent.” At the Clause 40 Foundation’s Ad Justitiam blog, Jonathan Blanks unpacks Monday’s opinions in Ramos, concluding that “[t]he tone and substance of the Ramos opinions show how race continues to inflect arguments about American law, and how far we still have to go to be a more perfect Union.” In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse explains that “[b]elow the surface of [the] 6-to-3 outcome lies a maelstrom of clashing agendas having little to do with the question ostensibly at hand and a great deal to do with the court’s future: Peek under the hood and see a Supreme Court in crisis.”
At The National Law Journal, Marcia Coyle reports that “[a] rare confession of error by the U.S. Office of Solicitor General to the U.S. Supreme Court may give a pro se prisoner in an immigration case another chance to convince a federal appeals court not to approve his removal from the country,” and that “[a]lthough confessions of error at the Supreme Court are uncommon, Brown’s case was remarkable for another reason: Many records in his case are sealed or not otherwise easily accessible.” At the ImmigrationProf Blog, Nancy Morawetz writes that “the confession of error obscures how Department of Justice (DOJ) is likely to continue to try to prevent Mr. Brown from ever having his case heard in a federal court”; she suggests that the Supreme Court “could be more cautious with confessions of error from the SG.”
In an analysis for The Washington Post (subscription required) of their recent research, Guy-Uriel Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer write that “the real culprit” in Wisconsin’s recent election that required people to show up at the polls during a public health emergency “is the Supreme Court’s 2018 political gerrymandering decision in Rucho v. Common Cause: In that case, the court could have — yet failed to — curb the type of extreme partisanship that led to what happened in Wisconsin.” At The Appeal, Jay Willis criticizes the Supreme Court’s “display of feigned judicial helplessness” in the opinion that led directly to the election, Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, which blocked a lower court order extending the deadline for mailing absentee ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Briefly:
We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY