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Supreme Court

Supreme Court to hear case on criminal penalties for homelessness

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Monday in a case that one legal expert has called the “most important Supreme Court case about homelessness in at least 40 years.” The issue before the court is the constitutionality of ordinances in an Oregon town that bar people who are homeless from using blankets, pillows, or cardboard boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within the city limits. Defending the ordinances, the city contends that the laws simply … Read the rest

Criminal Law

US Immigration Court Case Backlog Swells to Over 3 Million Amid Historic Rise in Border Crossings

The nation’s immigration-court backlog swelled by more than a million cases in 2023, rising from 1.9 million cases in September 2022 to surpass 3 million cases in November, Lauren Villagran reports for USA Today. There are now more immigrants in the U.S. with a pending immigration case than people living in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, with judges grappling with caseloads of more than 4,000 each. There were 734 immigration judges on the bench in October, up from 517 … Read the rest

Circuit Courts

Case Closure Rates Get Longer as E-Discovery Increases

Across the country, federal defender offices are struggling with increasingly complex litigation marked by escalating electronic discovery demands. Staffing shortages and the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic have added to their challenges.
Judiciary News – United States Courts

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Circuit Courts

Conference Acts to Promote Random Case Assignment

The Judicial Conference of the United States has strengthened the policy governing random case assignment, limiting the ability of litigants to effectively choose judges in certain cases by where they file a lawsuit.
Judiciary News – United States Courts

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Supreme Court

A packed courtroom for the Trump ballot case

We have known since last week (thanks to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer in The New York Times) that the big Republican elephant will not be in the room today when the U.S. Supreme Court takes the bench in Trump v. Anderson, about whether the Colorado Supreme Court erred in excluding former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.

Trump is reportedly starting the day at Mar-A-Lago, then heading to Nevada this evening for … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Court appoints lawyer in Oklahoma death penalty case

The Supreme Court on Friday morning appointed a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts to defend a ruling by an Oklahoma court leaving in place the conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip – even after the state’s attorney general agreed that they should be set aside.

The justices agreed to hear Glossip’s case on Monday, after considering the case at 11 consecutive conferences since late September 2023. Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Justices take up camping ban case

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether an Oregon city can enforce its ban on public camping against homeless people. The announcement came as part of a short list of orders released from the justices’ private conference earlier in the day adding five new cases to the court’s merits docket.

The court’s ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson could affect how other cities address their own epidemics of homelessness. San Francisco, which spent over $ … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Justices take up abortion case pitting state against federal law

The Supreme Court on Friday afternoon granted a request from Idaho and the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to temporarily put on hold a ruling by a federal district court that would require emergency rooms in the state to provide abortions to pregnant women in an emergency. The justices agreed to weigh in on the question at the center of the dispute: whether the federal law on which the lower court relied trumps an Idaho law that criminalizes most abortions in … Read the rest