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Justices broaden trial courts’ discretion in child-custody disputes under Hague Convention

The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave federal trial courts more discretion over whether children in some international custody disputes must be returned to their home countries. The unanimous decision in Golan v. Saada was the latest in a series of cases interpreting the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, an international agreement adopted in 1980 to deal with international child abduction during domestic disputes.

Under the Hague Convention, children who are wrongfully taken from the … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Justices earned extra money from books and teaching in 2021, disclosures show

Justice Amy Coney Barrett received $ 425,000 last year as part of a book deal reportedly worth $ 2 million, while Justice Neil Gorsuch received just over $ 250,000 in book royalties. The news came in financial disclosures released on Thursday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the administrative agency of the federal judiciary.

The justices are required to file the financial disclosures every year by May 15, although Justice Samuel Alito’s disclosure was not included in … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Justices decline to block Biden policy on social costs of greenhouse gases

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a plea from Louisiana and nine other states to bar federal agencies from considering the social costs of greenhouse gases as part of their decision-making process. In a brief, unsigned order, the justices declined to reinstate a district-court ruling that had temporarily blocked the Biden administration from using the cost estimates. There were no dissents recorded from Thursday’s order.

The dispute in which the justices declined to intervene began last year, after President … Read the rest

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Justices grant review in two cases that test jurisdiction of district courts

The Supreme Court on Monday added two new cases, both involving the jurisdiction of federal district courts, to the merits docket for the 2022-23 term. And the justices called for the federal government’s views in two more cases, involving a school board’s responsibility for student-on-student sexual harassment and pleading requirements in cases brought under the False Claims Act.

In Securities and Exchange Commission v. Cochran, the justices agreed to decide whether federal district courts have the power to … Read the rest

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Justices will clarify how death-row prisoners can contest a state’s method of execution

The Supreme Court doesn’t care all that much for method-of-execution challenges. It particularly disfavors Eighth Amendment litigation attacking familiar lethal injection protocols as “cruel and unusual” punishment. In the past 20 years, the court has announced substantive constitutional law, pleading requirements, and timeliness rules that make it harder to win such arguments. Nance v. Ward (to be argued on Monday) is about the procedural vehicle that prisoners must use to challenge execution methods. The case is important because Georgia’s … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Justices to consider California’s private-attorney-general exception to arbitration clause

The last few decades have witnessed the working out in several cases of a sustained disagreement between the Supreme Court and California legislators and judges. The Supreme Court has taken the view that the Federal Arbitration Act compels the enforcement, in state and federal courts, of pre-dispute arbitration agreements. Accordingly, the justices have rejected every effort to undermine the capacious application of those agreements to shift disputes between businesses and employees or customers from courts to arbitrators. California, acting … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Justices decline to reinstate GOP-backed congressional voting maps in North Carolina, Pennsylvania

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to block orders by courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania that threw out the congressional maps enacted by the states’ Republican legislatures and replaced them with maps drawn by the trial courts. The justices’ rulings mean that the states’ 2022 congressional elections will go ahead using the court-drawn maps.

But although the justices declined to intervene now, four justices signaled that they believe the court should soon take up the theory at the … Read the rest

Supreme Court

Greenhouse gases and “major questions”: Justices to hear argument on EPA’s power to tackle climate change

Three days after President Joe Biden named Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to succeed the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, Breyer and his colleagues will return to the bench on Monday morning to hear oral argument in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Although the case hinges on a highly technical provision of the Clean Air Act, it nonetheless has the potential to be one of the most consequential cases in a … Read the rest