Welcome to our community

Be apart of something great, join today!

Register Log in

SCOTUS Catch-all | 2024-25 Term Ends

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 415
  • Views: 12K
  • Politics 


“A split Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a challenge to a state ban on assault weapons, semiautomatic rifles that are popular among gun owners and that have also been used in multiple mass shootings.

The majority did not explain its reasoning in turning down the case, as is typical. But three conservative justices on the nine-member court publicly noted their disagreement, and a fourth said he is skeptical that such bans are constitutional.

Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have taken the case, and Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say the law likely runs afoul of the Second Amendment.…”
 
SCOTUS had about 30 decisions left outstanding going into today, apparently six decisions are being released today.
 

Supreme Court sides with woman claiming anti-straight job discrimination​

Marlean Ames filed a job discrimination lawsuit in 2020 after she lost out on two jobs to colleagues who were gay at the Ohio Youth Department.


“…
The justices unanimously struck down a standard used in nearly half the nation’s federal circuits that required people who are White, male or not gay to meet a higher bar to prove workplace bias in certain cases than do individuals whose minority communities have traditionally faced discrimination.

Marlean Ames argued it was unconstitutional to have different standards for different groups of people. She asked the Supreme Court to revive her discrimination claim against the agency overseeing youth corrections facilities in Ohio. Lower courts had ruled she hadn’t met the higher bar of proof.

… Lower courts said members of majority groups must meet a standard of proof not required of minorities — known as “background circumstances” — to mount a circumstantial discrimination case. That means they must show their employer is the unusual one that discriminates against majority groups, which have not historically faced discrimination.…”
 
nycfan said:
Click to expand...

“…
The Supreme Court decided Thursday that a Catholic charity doesn’t have to pay Wisconsin unemployment taxes, one of a set of religious-rights cases the justices are considering this term.

The ruling comes in a case filed by the Catholic Charities Bureau, which says the state violated the First Amendment’s religious freedom guarantee when it required the organization to pay the tax while exempting other faith groups.

Wisconsin argues the organization has paid the tax for over 50 years and doesn’t qualify for an exemption because its day-to-day work doesn’t involve religious teachings. Much of the groups’ funding is from public money, and neither employees nor people receiving services have to belong to any faith, according to court papers.

Catholic Charities, though, says it qualifies because its disability services are motivated by religious beliefs and the state shouldn’t be making determinations about what work qualifies as religious. It appealed to the Supreme Court after Wisconsin’s highest court ruled against it. President Donald Trump’s administration weighed in on behalf of Catholic Charites.…”
 
Justice Thomas unironically began a concurrence with this:

I join the Court’s opinion in full. I write separately to highlight the problems that arise when judges create atextual legal rules and frameworks. Judge-made doctrines have a tendency to distort the underlying statutory text, impose unnecessary burdens on litigants, and cause confusion for courts. The “background circumstances” rule—correctly rejected by the Court today—is one example of this phenomenon.

I trust you, Clarence. You are a world-historical paragon of text-distorting, court-confusing, burden-imposing problems.
 
nycfan said:
Click to expand...

1. The Supreme Court had to overrule a truly baffling decision by the 11th Circuit, which seems just incoherently cobbled together. They read the statute incorrectly to eviscerate all exceptions to the FTCA, but that rule would be favorable to plaintiffs. Of course they didn't want THAT, so they created out of thin air a "Supremacy Clause" defense in which the government can prevail if it shows that the officers' conduct (i.e. storming into a house, guns blazing) has "some nexus with furthering federal policy and can reasonably be characterized as complying with the full range of federal law."

That's of course a nonsense consideration. The whole thing is simply weird. That's not how the Supremacy Clause works. But to an aspiring dictator, it's manna from heaven. Sure, the officers committed all sorts of intentional torts, but as long as they were "furthering federal policy" it's OK. Does that sound like anything we've heard recently? You know, "furthering the president's agenda"?

2. So it might come as a surprise that two of the three judges were . . . Trump appointees. Psych. One was Supreme Court shortlister and overall incompetent "judge" Lagoa, who was clearly auditioning for a promotion. The other was just an undistinguished white dude who hates gay people and got the nomination so that he could sit there forever. Ha, joke will be on them when we cancel the circuits and reconstitute them . . .

Actually the only surprise was that a Biden nominee joined that abomination of an opinion. She's finishing up her second year in the job. Maybe she hasn't found her footing yet? I guess there's a weird 11th Circuit precedent from two years ago, but pretty sure the holding in the case is inapposite so it wasn't binding.

3. Anyway, few things depress me more when judges make basic and fundamental mistakes that we wouldn't tolerate from law students. The Supremacy Clause says that federal law is the supreme law of the land. The 11th Circuit seems to think it does the same thing for every federal policy or enforcement action. So if a state law gets in the way of a federal policy, they think the state law must yield.

It's impossible to overemphasize the ignorance required to reach this holding. It's not only that the Supremacy Clause is clear on its face. It's also that we have a doctrine of field preemption, which outlines the special circumstances in which federal policy can preempt state law -- namely, if Congress intended to "occupy the field" so that Congressional choices about what NOT to regulate have preclusive effect over states that want to regulate. If ever there was a statute not intended to occupy the field, it's this one -- with about 11 exceptions, and then 6 exceptions to the exception, several of which refer expressly to state law, and none of which even purport to displace state law since it's a statute about when the government waives its sovereign immunity.

It's ALSO that we have an anti-commandeering doctrine rooted in the 10th Amendment, which states that federal law cannot conscript state officials into enforcing federal law. That doesn't apply directly, but obviously it would be contradicted by any rule in which a federal desire for state assistance would preempt the state's refusal to provide it.

But how could the 11th Circuit have known it was wrong? Maybe they were just reading the statutes a little more aggressively than I am. Let's see -- oh, every circuit that has ruled on the question came out the other way, with all but one of them unanimous? And now the Supreme Court unanimously overturned?

4. There should be a rule that if you're an appellate judge, and you sign onto a ruling that contradicts every other appeals court and then gets unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court, you need a one year timeout, at a minimum, to pull your head out of your ass.
 
Meanwhile, I'll thank Gorsuch for including this bit of color in explaining why the 11th Circuit's reliance on an old case called Neagle was misplaced. Man, the court system in the late 19th century was both wild and shockingly corrupt. There are so many stories of cases where the Supreme Court just refused to let one party win, no matter what it took. Anyway:

To appreciate why that view is mistaken, a little history helps. In re Neagle involved an affair, a homicide, and a habeas petition. In 1883, Sarah Althea Hill claimed to be the wife of U. S. Senator William Sharon and sought a share of his fortune in acrimonious California divorce proceedings. Sharon admitted an affair but insisted that Hill had forged the pair’s handwritten marriage contract. Hill hired David Terry to represent her. A former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Terry had resigned that post after killing (another) U. S. Senator in a duel. As the litigation wore on, lawyer and client married. Eventually, the dispute between Hill and Sharon wound up before U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field while he was riding circuit.

Terry and Justice Field were no strangers, having served together on the California Supreme Court. Even so, Justice Field issued a devastating ruling against Hill. As he announced his decision, Hill leapt from her seat, denounced the Justice as “bought,” and had to be carried from the courtroom. Joining the fracas, Terry punched a marshal and brandished a bowie knife. Even after the couple spent time in jail for contempt, they continued to issue threats against Justice Field. Those events found their way into the U. S. Reports this way. Aware of the threat Hill and Terry posed, the U. S. Attorney General ordered Deputy Marshal David Neagle, a former chief of police in Tombstone, Arizona, to accompany Justice Field when he next rode circuit in California. That decision proved prescient, for Terry soon cornered the Justice on a train and attacked him. Intervening to protect the Justice, Neagle shot and killed Terry.

After the shooting, California authorities arrested Neagle and began prosecuting him for murder. Neagle countered by filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court seeking his release. When Neagle’s petition reached this Court, it agreed the writ should issue, reasoning that the Supremacy Clause shielded him from state criminal charges. Without some such protection, the Court concluded, California could frustrate federal law by prosecuting a federal marshal “for an act which he was authorized to do by the law of the United States,” an act “which it was his duty to do,” and in circumstances where he “did no more than what was necessary and proper.”

So anyway, the Supreme Court's decision about the Supremacy Clause was sort of silly, but they had to do something because literally a former state Supreme Court Justice tried to kill one of the Justices, and then convinced California to indict the bodyguard (well, not him, but surely his allies). The bodyguard who was accompanying the Justice while he was sitting, because of legitimate death threats against the Justice.
 
nycfan said:
Catholic Charities, though, says it qualifies because its disability services are motivated by religious beliefs and the state shouldn’t be making determinations about what work qualifies as religious. It appealed to the Supreme Court after Wisconsin’s highest court ruled against it. President Donald Trump’s administration weighed in on behalf of Catholic Charites.…”
Click to expand...
Hmmm. So if the state can’t determine it, who can?
 
BlooVooDoo said:
Hmmm. So if the state can’t determine it, who can?
Click to expand...
It's a bit more subtle than that. The state can determine it, but it has to do so properly. Here's how Sotomayor described the lower court holding:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court disagreed, holding that petitioners are not “operated primarily for religious purposes” because they neither engage in proselytization nor serve only Catholics in their charitable work.

I believe WI court was just following the statutory terms; it's an old statute. Anyway, that is quite obviously to me a plainly insufficient and discriminatory test of religious purpose. It was probably pushed by the exceedingly conservative WI Synod of the Lutheran Church, who never helped anyone outside their immediate church (according to my grandfather who lived and preached in WI as a member of the MO Synod of Lutheran Church) and thus had nothing to fear from that distinction.

Anyway, a Catholic charity that provides food assistance to poor families of any creed or faith is clearly religious in nature. All Justices agreed. Sometimes the cases heard by the Supreme Court are correcting horrific fuckups by lower courts. Most of the unanimous ones are.
 
lawtig02 said:
Seems like this could have enormous implications for this error-riddled ICE crackdown.
Click to expand...
Maybe. But since all other circuits were doing it the right way, and only the 11th went off on this exceedingly bizarre tangent (Lagoa!) I'm not sure how much practical import it will have.
 
superrific said:
It's a bit more subtle than that. The state can determine it, but it has to do so properly. Here's how Sotomayor described the lower court holding:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court disagreed, holding that petitioners are not “operated primarily for religious purposes” because they neither engage in proselytization nor serve only Catholics in their charitable work.

I believe WI court was just following the statutory terms; it's an old statute. Anyway, that is quite obviously to me a plainly insufficient and discriminatory test of religious purpose. It was probably pushed by the exceedingly conservative WI Synod of the Lutheran Church, who never helped anyone outside their immediate church (according to my grandfather who lived and preached in WI as a member of the MO Synod of Lutheran Church) and thus had nothing to fear from that distinction.

Anyway, a Catholic charity that provides food assistance to poor families of any creed or faith is clearly religious in nature. All Justices agreed. Sometimes the cases heard by the Supreme Court are correcting horrific fuckups by lower courts. Most of the unanimous ones are.
Click to expand...
Sounds straightforward. Thx for the explanation. Maybe WI should just do away with the exemption and make everyone pay unemployment taxes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top