Posts about the U.S. Supreme Court by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
There has been a lot of discussion on what President Obama meant when he said he wanted to choose a person who would judge with “empathy” for the U.S. Supreme Court. When articulating his decision to vote against Chief Justice John Roberts, Obama noted that 95 percent of cases would be relatively straightforward where most […]
Professor Joel Reidenberg has asked me to post the following response to the story regarding his Justice Scalia dossier class assignment [link no longer available]:
Justice Scalia recently spoke about privacy at a conference hosted by the Institute of American and Talmudic Law. The event sounded quite interesting, and I wish I could have been there. An AP report provides a brief overview of Scalia’s views on privacy:
Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Herring v. United States, a case examining whether the exclusionary rule should apply to a search that was based on an error in a database. In particular, due to a negligent error in a computer database indicating that there was an outstanding felony arrest warrant for Bennie […]
It’s an old debate, but an important issue: Should U.S. Supreme Court justices have life tenure? Linda Greenhouse has an interesting article in the New York Times:
Every term, commentators attempt to predict the outcomes of the cases in the Supreme Court docket. The statistics, however, suggest that the betting person’s answer should be reversal.
Over at SCOTUS Blog, Tom Goldstein wonders what would happen to the Supreme Court if a Republican were to win the presidency in 2008:
There is a lot of discussion about the lack of meaningful revelations in the Alito confirmation hearings. The Roberts confirmation hearings were also devoid of much meaningful substance as well. Basically, the nominee must say that he’ll have an open mind, that he will decide cases according to the “rule of law,” that he has respect for precedent, and […]
Although the Supreme Court feels some pressure for consistency via precedent, it doesn’t seem to strive at all for consistency in interpretive approach. Thus, the Court’s opinions are all over the map when it comes to the method of constitutional interpretation. Sometimes the Court reads the Constitution broadly and dynamically; sometimes it interprets the Constitution […]
The Supreme Court appointment process has become almost pathological . . . ironically, for rational reasons. The incentive is for presidents to select people who are: (1) young, so they have a reign on the Court that rivals Fidel Castro’s in length; and (2) obscure, so they have rarely taken any positions on any major […]