Writing at Balkinization, Jason Mazzone notes that the Westboro Baptist Church, infamous for picketing funerals for a variety of bizarre and hateful reasons, has filed an amicus brief in United States v. Windsor. That's the case in which the U.S. Supreme…
Speaking of the Supreme Court, before the debut of the Hat the big news was that Justice Thomas had astounded the legal world by actually speaking during oral argument. As it was his first utterance in nearly seven years, pundits…
Multiple sources are now reporting that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has uttered several words during oral argument. This is news because it is the first time he has spoken during an oral-argument session since February 22, 2006. Exactly…
I don’t know what John Elwood did to the people at SCOTUSblog to get himself sentenced to the task of reviewing the list of cases that the Supreme Court has either relisted or held, meaning it has not yet made…
For some years now, Professor Jay Wexler has been analyzing the transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments and tallying up the references to "[laughter]" in response to wisecracks from the bench. He first did this in 2005, and on Monday…
Despite the best efforts of the "West Virginia Belly Dancers for Single-Payer," who reportedly gyrated before the Supreme Court for approximately three hours this morning, a majority of justices voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare (whatever you want to…
I have jurisdictional questions.
Here’s one way: a justice asks you whether you have considered “just confessing error in this case.” Another piece of advice: once the number of justices who have told you to drop a particular argument reaches five, you might as…
As for the elephant ride, [Justice Ginsburg] told students that she joined Justice Scalia astride an elephant during a trip to India, according to the Contra Costa Times. "It was quite a magnificent, very elegant elephant," Ginsburg said. "And my…
If only there were people whose job it would be to say what the law means.