A couple weeks back, Supreme Court watcher Steve Vladeck pointed out a fascinating “tell” by Justice Samuel Alito in dealing with stays that he will issue on shadow docket requests. If he is prone to agree with the underlying claim, he’ll issue an unbounded stay on a lower court’s ruling. If he is inclined to […]

In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld what would seem to have been an extremely obvious conclusion reached by the federal court handling the case: yes, it definitely violates the Constitution to mandate the posting of a religious text in every classroom in Louisiana. This wasn’t about displaying an assortment of “foundational texts” […]

The Supreme Court’s latest recap of its relative inactivity (Trump administration “emergency” appeals aside) has delivered yet more evidence of this court’s indifference to rights violations committed by the government. Other cases involving alleged rights violations that should have — at the very least — been handed over to jury for further consideration were tacitly […]

“Exhaustion” is a legal term. It means plaintiffs need to explore the rest of their options before asking a court to handle their case or ask a higher court to handle a case the lower court has declared not quite exhausted enough. “Exhaustion” is also a human term. And that’s where we are with this […]

Last June, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld a lower court’s ruling declaring a Louisiana law mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools to be a violation of the Constitution. This decision made immediate sense, given that courts elsewhere in the nation (including the US Supreme Court) had repeatedly ruled that laws […]

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts […]

Trump and his supporters clearly believe migrants have no constitutional rights. But that’s simply not true. They have the same rights as citizens for one truly obvious reason: a government could choose to declare certain people non-citizens in order to strip them of their rights. That would be highly problematic in a nation that’s almost […]