Search Results for: Chief Justice John Roberts

In its euthanasia guidelines, the American Veterinary Medical Association advises against the use of nitrogen gas to kill rats. And yet Alabama is pushing ahead with plans to experiment with using the gas to execute its condemned. Even defendants convicted of the cruelest of murders cannot, except for cynically and spitefully, be said to be [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in case involving racial gerrymandering claims against South Carolina’s congressional map. The case is an appeal from a three-judge panel decision in the US District Court for the District of South Carolina Columbia Division, which found that South Carolina’s Republican-led legislature’s design of that state’s First [...]

“It must not be forgotten that it is perhaps more dangerous for a nation to allow itself to be conquered intellectually than by arms.” —Guillaume Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets” (1917) Nuclear weapons remain unique in the history of warfare and corresponding international law. Even a single instance of nuclear war-fighting could signify [...]

Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) LLC asked Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday to vacate a stay imposed by the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit halting the construction of one of the last portions of a 303-mile natural gas pipeline running from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia. MVP asserts that the Fourth [...]

In 2012, I authored a book called “Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court is not a Court, and its Justices are not Judges.” The thesis of the book was that, due to a perfect storm of factors, the Supreme Court in practice makes all-things-considered decisions, not legal decisions, with the only real constraint on the [...]

Sharon Basch is a rising 2L at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. The most recent spate of United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions handed down late last week have left American citizens more divided than ever. Within the last few years, the US Supreme Court has seen a large volume of what are [...]

The US Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s federal student loan forgiveness plan on Friday in a set of opinions. The court’s decisions in Department of Education v. Brown and Biden v. Nebraska bring to an end a nearly year-long saga in which Biden attempted to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans [...]

The US Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action, which allowed US colleges and universities to consider race in their admissions programs. In a consolidated case brought by Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., the court found that Harvard University—a private university—and the University of North Carolina (UNC)—a public university—violated the US Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause by [...]

The US Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in Moore v. Harper that the “independent legislature” election theory, which has been the legal foundation for many of the recent Republican-led efforts to change election administration law and overturn 2020 election results, is an invalid interpretation of the Election Clause of the Constitution. The theory stipulates that state [...]

The US Supreme Court held Thursday that a local union must litigate a property damage dispute in state court, as opposed to appearing before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the court found that federal labor law, under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), did not preempt [...]