LIVE

Announcement of opinions for Friday, June 21 (complete)

On Friday, June 21, we were live as the court released five opinions in cases from the current term.

• In Texas v. New Mexico, the court upholds the U.S.’s objections to a consent decree that would resolve the dispute over each state’s allocation of the waters of the Rio Grande.
• The court rules 6-3 in Department of State v. Munoz that a citizen does not have a fundamental liberty interest in her noncitizen spouse being admitted to the country.
• In Erlinger v. United States, the court rules that under the Armed Career Criminal Act, which imposes mandatory prison terms, a judge should use a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard to decide whether the offenses were committed on separate occasions or instead a jury must make those decisions unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt.
• In Smith v. Arizona, the court rules that when an expert conveys an absent lab analyst’s statements in support of the expert’s opinion, and the statements provide that support only if true, then the statements come into evidence for their truth, and thus implicate the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause.
• The Supreme Court rejects the challenge to the constitutionality of a federal law that bans the possession of a gun by someone who has been the subject of a domestic violent restraining order in United States v. Rahimi.

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