U.S. Courts News Reporter
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Monday’s argument in Smith v. Spizziri was this month’s case under the Federal Arbitration Act. This one explores what a trial court can do when it refers a pending suit to arbitration. Section 3 of the FAA says that if the court refers the case to arbitration, it “shall on application of one of the parties stay the trial of the action until such arbitration has been had.” The question is whether the trial court, instead of staying the … Read the rest
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The justices on Friday ruled in favor of a group of truck drivers who transport goods for Wonder Bread in their arbitration dispute. Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St. is another of the court’s numerous cases interpreting the Federal Arbitration Act’s command that courts enforce mandatory pre-dispute arbitration agreements. Bissonnette involves an exception from the FAA for any “class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce,” and the question in Bissonnette is whether that exception turns on the … Read the rest
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The justices were considerably more subdued in the argument in Connelly v. Internal Revenue Service than they were on Tuesday, when they confronted the FDA’s treatment of the abortion drug mifepristone. This is a case about the tax treatment of life insurance policies that closely held corporations use to manage the death of a shareholder. Assume, as is common, a small corporation owned by members of the same family. When one dies, if the surviving shareholders want to keep … Read the rest
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Tuesday’s argument in Truck Insurance Exchange v. Kaiser Gypsum Co. considered a technical question under the Bankruptcy Code, how to decide when an entity is a “party in interest” under the statute, which gives it a right to “be heard on any issue” in a Chapter 11 proceeding. The debtor, a failed asbestos company, claims that it will perform its insurance contracts in full: It will pay all the deductibles it owes, 100 cents on the dollar. Accordingly, it … Read the rest
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Amid the debate over free speech on university campuses, the justices on Monday set aside a decision by a federal appeals court in a case involving whether so-called “bias-response team policies” – procedures created by universities to solicit, track, and investigate reports of bias – chill students’ speech.
The order in Speech First v. Sands was part of a list of orders from the court’s private conference last week.
Over a dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas that was joined … Read the rest
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Wednesday’s oral argument in Coinbase v. Suski was the court’s second case in February under the Federal Arbitration Act, and by all accounts this one will be a lot easier for them to resolve than Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries. Coinbase is a technical dispute about the “delegation clause” in an arbitration agreement, which “delegates” to the arbitrator not only the job of resolving the dispute between the parties, but also the threshold question whether any particular dispute falls … Read the rest
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On Friday afternoon, the justices declined to temporarily block the U.S. Military Academy from considering race in its admissions process. In an unsigned order, the justices turned down a request from the same group that spearheaded challenges to the use of affirmative action in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and which now argues that West Point’s use of race violates the Constitution.
Friday’s order also included a relatively unusual statement that provided a possible glimpse … Read the rest
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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