SCOTUSblog

The Supreme Court is accustomed to having the last word on matters of constitutional interpretation. But in the application of First Amendment free speech principles to restrictions on corporate campaign spending, the Montana Supreme Court invoked one of the lessons from first-year law school – that facts matter – to uphold state restrictions on independent [...]

Coverage of the Court yesterday was dominated by the news that, earlier this month, Justice Breyer was the victim of a break-in at his Georgetown home.  Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News reports on the story, as do Bill Mears of CNN, the New York Times, Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger of The Washington Post, James [...]

The petition of the day is:

John Elwood reviews Monday’s relisted and held cases. Monday was a big day.  Facebook raised the price range of its IPO to $34-38 a share, up from $28-35; in a related story, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was buying Greece, Spain and Portugal with change he found under his sofa cushions, thus resolving the [...]

Coverage of Monday’s decision in Hall v. United States continued yesterday. Writing for this blog, Ronald Mann argued that the case, in which the Court held that tax liability incurred from the post-petition sale of a family farm is not dischargeable under Chapter 12 of the Bankruptcy Code, is “emblematic of the Court’s long-standing skepticism of the [...]

The petition of the day is:

Monday’s decision in Hall v. United States is emblematic of the Court’s long-standing skepticism of the Bankruptcy Code as an important institution for mitigating the long-term costs of financial distress.  As a jurisprudential matter, the case is a classic conflict of wholly separate worlds:  the world of the IRS and the Internal Revenue Code on [...]

Coverage of Monday’s opinions and orders continued yesterday.  At JURIST, Julia Zebley summarizes Monday’s decision in Hall v. United States, in which the Court held that the federal income tax liability resulting from petitioners’ post-petition farm sale is not incurred by the estate under Section 503(b) of the Bankruptcy Code and thus is neither collectible [...]

Analysis For most of the past four years, the volunteer lawyers who are helping Guantanamo Bay detainees use their constitutional right of access to U.S. courts have faced a dilemma: they assumed that, at some point, the Supreme Court would again get interested in those cases, but they had no idea what it would take [...]

At its May 17, 2012 Conference, the Court will consider such issues as the presumption of accuracy of intelligence reports in Guantanamo habeas decisions, standing to challenge the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the standard of federal habeas review for state court factual determinations, and the burden of proof for affirmative defenses in a criminal case.  This [...]