Sunday, April 14, 2024

News & Notes

1.SCOTUS will hear Fischer v. United States on Tuesday, which will impact the January 6 cases as well as others. The issue: Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit erred in construing 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c), which prohibits obstruction of congressional inquiries and investigations, to include acts unrelated to investigations and evidence. 

 The WaPo has more here, as does SCOTUSBlog. Many are expecting, yet again, for the Supreme Court to say that prosecutors and lower courts have stretched statutes too far.

2. Speaking of SCOTUS, here's a nice AP piece about Lisa Blatt from Williams & Connolly, who has argued almost 50 cases before the High Court. A snippet:

She can be strikingly informal, in one case referring to the highest court in the land as “you guys.” She is often blunt, once telling Justice Elena Kagan that her question was factually and fundamentally wrong. She has resorted to the personal, in one case where she felt her Harvard-educated opponent was being condescending. “I didn’t go to a fancy law school, but I’m very confident in my representation of the case law,” the University of Texas graduate said.

“Texas is a fine law school,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, just as the arguments were ending and before the court handed Blatt a unanimous win.

Blatt also can be hyperbolic, cautioning last year that a decision against her client, a Turkish bank, would be “borderline, you know, cataclysmic.” A ruling that recognized a large swath of Oklahoma as tribal land would have “earth-shattering” consequences, she said in 2018. The justices risked causing “madness, confusion, and chaos” if they ruled for a high school student who was suspended from the cheerleading squad over a vulgar social media post.

3. Linda Greenhouse has this op-ed about whether the Supreme Court needs to get along or not. From the conclusion:

The Supreme Court and other appellate courts are categorized in the judicial literature as collegial courts. “Collegial” in that usage is a term of art. It doesn’t mean that the judges necessarily get along. It means that these multimember courts act as collectives, when a majority coalesces. In a forthcoming memoir, “Vision,” Judge David Tatel, who recently retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, offers as good a definition of judicial collegiality as I have seen. “Judicial collegiality,” he writes, “has nothing to do with singing holiday songs, having lunch or attending basketball games together. It has everything to do with respecting each other, listening to each other and sometimes even changing our minds.”

Years ago, Mark Alan Stamaty used a “Washingtoon,” his cartoon that ran regularly in The Washington Post, to depict the Supreme Court justices walking in single file, each carrying a bundle. “The Supreme Court Goes to the Laundromat” was the title. I thought it was so funny that I kept it for years tacked to the New York Times cubicle in the Supreme Court pressroom. It portrayed, to be sure, a collegial Supreme Court.

But it was a cartoon.


4. And finally, there's a little trial starting tomorrow in NYC. So many people are saying that Trump has no chance because it's in NY. I still have faith in our jury system. I discuss it with Katie Phang on her show here:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Many people are saying (strongly), that he has not shot because he's guilty. Bigly guilty. But you know when you are a star and former President that “"they let you do it.” “You can do anything.” “Grab them by the p---y.” I have faith in our jury system too.