U.S. Courts News Reporter
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A lawyer’s legal advice is privileged. A court cannot order the lawyer or the client to disclose it. But a lawyer’s nonlegal advice is not privileged. What happens when advice is partly legal and partly nonlegal and the two parts cannot be untangled? In such dual-purpose situations, does the privilege protect all the advice or none of it?
On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear opposing answers to that question in a case known as In re Grand Jury… Read the rest
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At the end of each year, SCOTUSblog remembers some of the people whose lives and work left an imprint on the Supreme Court. From legendary lawyers to lesser-known activists, journalists, and plaintiffs, the following individuals who died in 2022 all shaped the court and the law in their own ways.
Read past years’ remembrances: 2021, 2020.
Forty-nine years before the leaked opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, … Read the rest
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The Petitions of the Week column highlights a selection of cert petitions recently filed in the Supreme Court. A list of all petitions we’re watching is available here.
In June 2021, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned decision instructing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit to reconsider whether police in St. Louis, Missouri, used unconstitutionally excessive force when they knelt on the back of Nicholas Gilbert for 15 minutes until he suffocated. This week, we … Read the rest
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The Petitions of the Week column highlights a selection of cert petitions recently filed in the Supreme Court. A list of all petitions we’re watching is available here.
The Sixth Amendment gives anyone standing trial the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against” them. In January, the justices held that a New York court violated the confrontation clause when it upheld a homicide conviction although the jury had heard an incriminating statement from a co-defendant who did … Read the rest
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The Supreme Court will resume its pre-pandemic practice of announcing opinions from the bench, the court’s Public Information Office said on Monday afternoon. But although the justices now provide live audio of oral arguments, the opinion announcements will not be livestreamed. Instead, consistent with the court’s pre-pandemic practice, the audio of opinion announcements will not be available until the beginning of the following term.
The resumption of in-person opinion announcements marks another step in the court’s slow return to … Read the rest
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In a brief order with no recorded dissents, the Supreme Court refused to block the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith, a 57-year-old inmate who is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 7 p.m. EST on Thursday in Alabama. Smith was convicted for the 1988 murder of Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett, whom he was hired to kill by her husband, Rev. Charles Sennett.
By a vote of 11 to 1, the jury in Smith’s 1996 capital trial recommended that he … Read the rest
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The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for a cellphone provider to turn over call records for Dr. Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, to the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Ward had asked the justices to block a subpoena addressed to T-Mobile, arguing that there “could hardly be a starker example of seeking to punish people for having ties to political views regarding the outcome of the 2020 … Read the rest
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“The bird is freed,” Elon Musk tweeted on the night he completed his $ 44 billion purchase of Twitter.
What he didn’t say is that a series of court cases may soon clip its wings.
A self-described free-speech absolutist, Musk has suggested he will loosen Twitter’s content-moderation rules, allow more objectionable speech to remain on the site, and reinstate some users who have been banned. Three days after reassuring advertisers that he won’t let Twitter become a “free-for-all hellscape,” he … Read the rest