Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is unhappy again – not with a substantive ruling by the court, but with a decision by the majority to decline to hear a particular case. Last year, Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, dissented from a decision by the majority – one in a long line – not to… Continue reading The Supreme Court Declines to Resolve Yet Another Lower Court Conflict
Tag: SCOTUS
Faculty Blog: Analyzing Race-Based Classifications After Fisher
By: Lawrence M. Friedman In his dissenting opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas, Justice Alito argues that the Court indulged the university’s “plea for deference” in the application of strict scrutiny to its race-based affirmative action program. And he’s probably right, too: the scrutiny the majority applied in Fisher seems less strict than the scrutiny the Court historically has given race-based classifications. But this isn’t to say that the result Alito would have reached—striking down the university’s plan—is also right. For he fails to appreciate that, just as equal protection doctrine protects only individuals who are similarly situated, strict scrutiny applies in the same way only in similarly situated cases. In other words, context matters—and context explains why higher education affirmative action programs may survive judicial review where the governmental use of race in other contexts would not.
Faculty Blog: SCOTUS’s Use of Exclusionary Rule Becomes A Charade in Utah v. Strieff
By: Victor M. Hansen The Court’s opinion in Utah v. Strieff is the latest in a series of recent opinions in which the Court has significantly undermined Fourth Amendment protections by limiting the application of the exclusionary rule. As my colleague, Professor Friedman, noted in his recent post, the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence effectively allows the government to pursue policy goals in ways that conflict with individual privacy protections. The Court has been able to justify this by viewing the exclusionary rule as solely a tool to deter police misconduct. In situations where, in the Court’s view, the exclusionary rule would not deter police misconduct, the rule comes at too high a cost, and a number of exceptions have been judicially created to limit its application. Of course, the exclusionary rule is a judicially created rule to begin with, since nothing in the language of the Fourth Amendment suggests a remedy for violations. And it can certainly be argued that, since the rule is judicially created, the courts and specifically the U.S. Supreme Court should be able to modify it as it sees fit. However, on closer examination, the Court’s rationale for not applying the exclusionary rule in Strieff and other recent cases only makes sense if you adopt a rather narrow view of deterrence.
Faculty Blog: Supreme Court Effectively Upholds Fifth Circuit Judge’s Injunction of DAPA in U.S. v. Texas
By: Dina Francesca Haynes Last week, the Supreme Court issued its (non)-decision in Texas v. United States. At issue: whether one judge in Texas could enjoin a federal immigration program crafted by the Executive Branch, and whether the Executive Branch had exceeded its authority in so doing. I wrote about this case earlier this year, predicting a 4-4 split with the current court one justice down. Unfortunately, my prediction was borne out. The 5th Circuit—specifically one judge, Judge Hanen (who was recently accused of abuse of discretion when he imposed sanctions on federal government attorneys whose arguments he didn’t like)—had earlier decided that the State of Texas had established a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their procedural and substantive claims required for an injunction. What is unusual in this case is that a district judge's preliminary injunction applies nationwide (and not, as would ordinarily be the case, in the judge's district only).
Faculty Blog: Utah v. Strieff: The Court Reminds Us That Constitutional Privacy is Essentially Meaningless
By: Lawrence M. Friedman The U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from pursuing its policy goals in ways that conflict with individual rights protections—except, as the Supreme Court reminds us in its decision in Utah v. Strieff, where the protection of privacy under the Fourth Amendment is concerned. The remedy for a Fourth Amendment violation is exclusion of the evidence obtained as a result of an illegal search or seizure. Deterrence of governmental misconduct has been the animating principle of the exclusionary rule for decades (though it was originally just one of several rationales), and the nature of the Court’s cost-benefit deterrence analysis has led it, time and again, to conclude that the costs of suppression outweigh any potentially beneficial deterrent effect. As Justice Clarence Thomas explains in the opening paragraph of his opinion for the majority in Strieff, “even when there is a Fourth Amendment violation, [the] exclusionary rule does not apply when the costs of exclusion outweigh its deterrent benefits.”
Faculty Blog: Williams v. Pennsylvania Raises Major Concerns About U.S. Justice System
Faculty Blog: Zubik v. Burwell: The Supreme Court Punts on Religious Nonprofits’ Challenge to the Affordable Care Act Contraceptive Coverage Opt-Out
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in on the merits of religious nonprofit organizations’ challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage religious opt-out regulations. The regulations allow religious nonprofits to avoid the legal responsibility of covering contraceptives in their health insurance plans by providing notice that they object to doing so on religious grounds. The petitioners in the cases consolidated in Zubik v. Burwell claimed that furnishing this notice imposed a substantial burden on their religious exercise. In a per curiam opinion, the Court noted that supplemental briefing that addressed whether contraceptive coverage could be provided to the petitioners’ employees without the required notice had revealed the feasibility of such an option. The Court remanded the cases for investigation of this option, without making a decision on the plaintiffs’ Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) claim.
Faculty Blog: The Psychology of Conflicts of Interest in Williams v. Pennsylvania
Faculty Blog: Spokeo v. Robins: Two Challenges to Identity
Faculty Blog: United States v. Texas
On April 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of United States v. Texas. The case involves the arguments put forward by twenty-six states, challenging the President’s November of 2014 Executive Action, which could have made around 5 million parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents (known as DAPA) eligible to apply to have their deportation deferred. It would also have slightly expanded the class of pre-existing eligibility for deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA), already in effect since 2012. The mechanism through which executive action would take place is the President’s request that his subordinates within the prosecutorial arms of DHS to exercise their prosecutorial discretion in determining where and how to use and focus limited deportation resources. Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act, tasking the agencies with enforcing immigration, but provides insufficient funds for the agencies to carry out their mandates. The Executive must then make decisions about how to prioritize those mandates. Neither DAPA nor the expanded DACA class confers anything other than the eligibility for certain persons to apply for time limited deferral from removal. With deferred action, under a different set of pre-existing regulations, passed under earlier Congresses and presidents, comes eligibility for work authorization.