A view from the Courtroom: Vehicle problems

With stories abounding that the Court is lurching towards the conclusion of this most unusual term, we enter thismorning with a lucky thirteen merits decisions still outstanding. The Justices will make a dent in that number today.

The signs that were now well into the late stages of the term are popping up everywhere. The television networks have their opinion runners stationed in the hallway outside the Public Information Office. These are the young people, often college interns clad in business attire but with athletic shoes, who whisk opinions from PIO out to the correspondents doing standups on the sidewalk.

Secondly, the first conference list for September has been distributed, listing appeals that wont be considered until the Justices come back from their summer recess.

And in the courtroom, we learn that today is the last day for in-court admissions to the Supreme Court Bar. There will be 145 candidates admitted after opinions today, so many that they spill over from the bar section and take up several rows of the public gallery.

U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. is back in the courtroom this morning. He was absent the last few sessions after his early June announcement that he plans to depart his post. The federal government will be a party or have a position in each of the five decisions that will be announced later this morning, and Verrillis office will fare pretty well today.

When the Justices take the bench, the first of the cases isTaylorv.United States. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. writes for a seven-one Court that a prosecution under the Hobbs Act satisfies that statutesinterstatecommerce element if it shows that the defendant robbed or attempted to rob a drug dealer of drugs or drug proceeds. And in this case, the government met its burdenby provingthat the defendants gang had intentionally targeted drug dealers to obtain drugs an drug proceeds, Alito says.

In his bench summary, Alito provides a variation of this statement from his written opinion: For obvious reasons, drug dealers are more likely than ordinary citizens to keep large quantities of cash and illegal drugs in their homes and are less likely to report robberies to the police.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the current Courts strongest proponent of limiting congressional powers,is the lone dissenter in the case.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announces that Alito also has our opinion in Number 15-138,RJR Nabisco Inc.v.European Community.

This case is somewhat more complicated than Taylor, Alito says. Indeed. He takes us through the complex allegations that the U.S. tobacco and food concern and related entities participated in a global money-laundering scheme, and that the European Community is pressing its suit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

For a time it appears that the European Community will prevail, because of the Courts conclusions that the alleged enterprise includes predicate offenses that were committed in the United States or had sufficient ties to U.S. commerce.

But Alito goes on to discuss how irrespective of the extraterritoriality of some RICO provisions, the statutes separateprivate right of actionon which the EC is relying to bring its suitdoes not overcome the presumption against extraterritoriality, and thus a private RICO plaintiff must allege and proveitsinjuryoccurred in this country not abroad. The European Community and other respondents waived their domestic-injury claims at an earlier stageof the case, and their remaining RICO damages claims rest entirely on injury suffered abroad and must be dismissed.

With Justice Sonia Sotomayor not participatingbecause she was involved in an earlier stage when a judge on the court of appeals, the decision is seven to zero in some respects and four to three inthe part that limits the private right to sue.If she had participated, the case very well might have been a four-four tie.

After that complex matter, were ready for something a bit easier to handle. The Chief Justice says that Justice Stephen G. Breyer has the opinion inCuozzo Speed Technologies LLCv.Lee.

This is a patent case, Justice Breyer explains. Oh, great. But as patent cases go, this one is somewhat more understandable than most.

The legal question involves a regulation adopted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office concerning its authority to cancel a already-issued patent based on a review process bringing information to light that the patent should not have been issued in the first place.

Breyer has some fun describing the underlying dispute over a patent that Cuozzo received in 2002 for a speedometer that shows a driver when he exceeds the speed limit in any given location, combining GPS data with a mechanism that makes the speedometer dial turn red at the excessive speed.

Breyer cups his left hand as he further describes the inventions rotating disc made of translucent red glass or cellophane.

The GPS system determines where the car is, the chip determines the speed limit at that place, and the red disc then rotates to that point on the speedometersay, 65 miles per hourmaking the needle look red as soon as the needle passes that point, Breyer says.

This patent was challenged by a competitor, and the Patent Office held that in light of prior art, anyone who is not an automaton [the Patent Offices words, Breyer stresses] would have been able to figure out how to make this invention. The written opinion further explains that in the view of the Patent Office, a non-automaton is anyone with ordinary skill and ordinary creativity.

The Courts ruling to uphold the Patent Offices decision to cancel the patent is unanimous in some respects and six to twoin others, with Justice Alito joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the partial dissent. The heart of the ruling is that the Patent Office can read the challenged patent very broadly in order to strike it down.

Justice Thomas is next with the opinion inUtahv.Strieff, about an admittedly unlawful investigatory stop of a Utah man by police, who determined the manwas wanted onan outstanding warrant, which led to a search of his person that found illegal methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.

Thomas writes for a five-threeCourt that the drug evidence need not be suppressed because the link between the unconstitutional stop and the discovery of the drugs is too attenuated under the Courts Fourth Amendment doctrine.

In this case, there was no flagrant police misconduct, Thomas says, so the police officers discovery of a pre-existing, untainted arrest warrant for the suspect attenuated the connection between the unconstitutional stop and the drug evidence.

Sotomayor has written a particularly strong dissent, joined in part by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, citingamong other thingsthe large number of outstanding warrants in Ferguson, Mo., and the talk that black and brown parents give their children about interactions with the police. But she does not read it in the courtroom.

This means that with eight decisions left in the term, there have been no dissents from the bench.

(Justice Elena Kagan also dissents inStrieff, joined in full by Ginsburg.)

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has the last opinion of the day, inEncino Motorcars LLCv.Navarro, in which the underlying case is about whether service advisors in a Mercedes-Benz dealership are entitled to overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The briefs in this case were a bit of an eye opener for how the friendly service advisor who greets you when you bring your car to the dealership service department is often a commissioned salesperson charged with trying to upsell you on certain parts and services.

This is the one case today that was an outright loss for the Solicitor Generals office.

An appropriate way for the Court to deliver the opinion might have been to gather the governments lawyers in a linoleum-floored waiting room with a vending machine dispensing bad coffee and a TV blaring The Price is Right. Then, Justice Kennedy would take clipboard in hand to explain his opinion that the Department of Labors 2011-model regulation that the service advisors were not salespeople and thus not exempt from overtime was faulty and in need of an overhaul.

Instead, in the more august setting of the Courtroom, Kennedy explains that the governments regulation granting the service advisers overtime pay is not controllingbecause it is procedurally defective. The vehicle will have to be kept overnight, and probably much longer, since it is being sent back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for that court to interpret the Labor Department regulation withoutthatChevrondeference.

Thomas writes a dissent, joined by Alito.

With that, Chief Justice Roberts signals to Clerk Scott S. Harris to start the ball rolling on those 145 bar admissions. There are several individuals up for admission, plus large groups from the Federal Bar Association, Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, and the Phi Alpha Delta law fraternity.

For what its worth, the Georgetown Law group has better seats than Harvard Law, with the latter mostly back in the public gallery. And the Phi Alpha Delta fraternity is made up of women as well as men, and none of them look like they have spent the weekend partying. (It is a service organization, the fraternitys website explains. But so was my college fraternity, and that did not exclude a certain amount of partying.)

The bar admissions take almost as long as it took to deliver the five opinions. At 10:40 a.m., Marshal Pamela Talkin announces that the Court will reconvene this Thursday.

The automatons of the Supreme Court press corps begin debating how many more opinion days there might be to issue the remaining eight decisions.