#supreme-court

#supreme-court

This morning in a much anticipated decision, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Writing for a five-four majority, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that Congress' action to protect minority voting rights in nine states was based on outdated data, and the formula used to determine which areas were subject to federal oversight was thus unconstitutional.

Texas can use its new, GOP-friendly congressional map while a legal challenge plays out, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, temporarily pausing a lower court ruling that had blocked the map from going into effect. With the Dec. 8 candidate filing deadline fast approaching, the high court's decision likely means Texas' new map will be used for the 2026 midterm elections.

The dairy industry sought a deal with President Richard Nixon to write a huge campaign check to his reelection campaign-in exchange for price supports that would artificially raise the cost of milk. But federal law strictly limited the amount it could donate. So Nixon's henchmen devised a workaround: Dairy companies would funnel $2 million through various Republican Party committees, which could then transfer the cash to Nixon's campaign.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order deferring a decision in Trump v. Perlmutter, a case in which President Donald Trump is asking the Court to stay an interlocutory injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in September restoring Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to her post pending her lawsuit against Trump for removing her from office.

Some justices were skeptical of arguments that ISPs should have no legal obligation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to terminate an account when a user's IP address has been repeatedly flagged for downloading pirated music. But justices also seemed hesitant to rule in favor of record labels, with some of the debate focusing on how ISPs should handle large accounts like universities where there could be tens of thousands of users.

As the tumultuous first year of Donald Trump's second term as president approaches its end, it's difficult to assess his successes and his failures. For one thing, his governing strategy has been all but unprecedented. Most presidents who have just won an election are forced to choose whether they want to cash in their political chips to get big things done or build up political capital for future elections.

In its sweeping Trump v. Wilcox decision in May, the Court ruled that the president "may remove without cause" officials in administrative agencies-a decision grounded in the Court's ringing endorsement of the so-called unitary executive. An elementary application of the unitary-executive theory would allow the White House to interfere, unchecked, with the Fed-just as the Court has empowered Trump to gut every other federal agency.

Davis and her anti-gay lawyers at the Liberty Counsel were contesting a money damages award of $100,000 plus $260,000 in legal fees that Davis was ordered to pay to two men she refused to marry back in the day. "Back in the day" is a journalistic shortcut for, "I think it must have been 2015 but I don't feel like checking."

The US government has rolled back a policy that threatened to invalidate passports showing trans people's correct gender identity. Less than a week after the change was discovered, a section of the State Department's website was modified to remove the threat that trans people's passports would be invalidated if the document did not detail their "biological sex". An update on the website's page regarding passport sex markers, originally discovered by Transitics reporter Aleksandra last Thursday (13 November), said it no longer issued passports or other documents with a gender-neutral "X" marker or markers that did not match a person's "biological sex at birth".

The US supreme court agreed on Monday to hear a defense by the Trump administration of the government's authority to limit the processing of asylum claims at ports of entry along the US-Mexico border. The court took up the administration's appeal of a lower court's determination that the metering policy, under which US immigration officials could stop asylum seekers at the border and decline to process their claims, violated federal law.

Ed. Note: A weekly roundup of just a few items from Howard Bashman's How Appealing blog, the Web's first blog devoted to appellate litigation. Check out these stories and more at How Appealing. "A Senators-Only Right to Sue in Shutdown Deal; In their legislation reopening the government, senators awarded themselves a legal power to sue the government that should be universal": Anya Bidwell and Patrick Jaicomo have this essay online at The Wall Street Journal. "Judging The Justice System In The Age Of Trump: Nancy Gertner." You can access the new episode of David Lat's "Original Jurisdiction" podcast via this link. "Gorsuch Joins Sotomayor as Supreme Court Children's Author": Justin Wise of Bloomberg Law has this report.