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SCOTUS for law students: Justice William Brennan and Supreme Court avoidance
Even before Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy this fall, some commentators were suggesting that liberals might want to avoid appealing cases to the increasingly conservative...
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Ask the author: Meet Justice Edward Sanford
The following is a series of questions prompted by Stephanie Slater’s “Edward Terry Sanford: A Tennessean on the U.S. Supreme Court” (University of Tennessee Press, 2018). This is the first biography...
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SCOTUS for law students: President George H.W. Bush’s Supreme Court legacy
Shortly before his death in 1826, President John Adams was quoted as saying, “My gift of John Marshall to the people of the United States was the proudest act of my life.” Adams was one of the earliest...
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Ask the author: “The great oracle of American legal thought” – revisiting the...
The following is a series of questions posed by Ronald Collins to Stephen Budiansky concerning Budiansky’s book “Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas” (W.W. Norton, 2019, 592 pp.,...
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Ask the author: “So Long, Earl”
The following is a series of questions prompted by the forthcoming publication of Michael Bobelian’s “Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the...
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The Framer’s intent: Gouverneur Morris, the Committee of Style and the...
As the federal constitutional convention drew to a close, the delegates appointed the Committee of Style and Arrangement to prepare a final Constitution from the textual provisions that the convention...
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The not-so-modern death penalty
The death penalty has generated dispute and controversy at the Supreme Court for decades. This past term was nothing new. In Bucklew v. Precythe, Justice Neil Gorsuch proclaimed for a bare majority...
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A look back at 2019: A tale of two terms?
Any review of a calendar year at the Supreme Court necessarily includes two different terms: the term that ends in June and the new one that begins in October and will run into the following year. But...
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The federal death penalty at the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court is the court of last resort for death row inmates around the country. The vast majority of death row inmates are convicted and sentenced under state death penalty laws, and so most of...
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Supreme Court’s closure could be first disease-related shuttering in a...
On Thursday, the Supreme Court announced that it would close its doors to the public “until further notice” “[o]ut of concern for the health and safety of the public and Supreme Court employees.” The...
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