Supreme Court Decision Syllabus (SCOTUS Podcast)

Send us Fan Mail City of Grants Pass v. Johnson Grants Pass, Oregon, is home to roughly 38,000 people, about 600 of whom are estimated to experience homelessness on a given day. Like many local governments across the Nation, Grants Pass has publiccamping laws that restrict encampments on public property. The Grants Pass Municipal Code prohibits activities such as camping on public property or park...

Send us Fan Mail The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 imposes criminal liability on anyone who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.” 18 U. S. C. §1512(c)(1). The next subsection extends that prohibition to anyone who “otherwise obst...

Send us Fan Mail Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo This is a consolidated opinion of two cases that were argued this term.  Both of them bring into question rules promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service under the Magnuson-Stevens Act -- which applies the Adminsitrative Procedures Act.  The only question on appeal is whether Chevron is still good law.  Chief Justice Roberts, writing...

Send us Fan Mail In this very brief Per Curiam decision, RJ Dieken also reads the concurring opinions authored Justice Kagan and Justice Barrett.  Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Harrington v. Purdue Pharma Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty in 2007 to a federal felony based on its role in misbranding Oxycontin -- which was far more addictive than the company had made it out to be.  Purdue faced seemingly endless lawsuits in the following years based on how addictive the opioid Oxycontin was.  For over a decade that followed, the Sackler family, who owned Purdue...

Send us Fan Mail Ohio v. EPA The Clean Air Act requires both the States and federal government to help develop environmental regulations.  When the EPA creates certain standards regarding air quality, states have to develop their own "State Implementation Plan," which requires States to both set out how to go about applying the federal regulations, and it also requires States to consider...

Send us Fan Mail SEC v. Jarkesy In the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Congress passed a suite of laws designed to combat securities fraud and increase market transparency. Three such statutes are relevant: The Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. These Acts respectively govern the registration of securities, the trading...

Send us Fan Mail Murthy v. Missouri Missouri, alongside a few other states, sued the federal government alleging that certain federal officials illegally coordinated with social media companies to effectively silence certain viewpoints -- which they claim, amounts to these companies becoming state actors within the meaning of First Amendment jurisprudence.    Held: Neither the individual nor the s...

Send us Fan Mail Snyder v. United States Snyder served as the Mayor in a town in Indiana.  After the town awarded a $1.2 million contract to a trucking company, he received a $13,000 payment from that company, he said this was for consulting services.  He was prosecuted by the federal government and convicted for taking an illegal gratuity.  He said that Section 666, which is what the charges were...

Send us Fan Mail  Texas v. New Mexico Approved by Congress in 1938, the Rio Grande Compact is an interstate agreement that apportions the waters of the Rio Grande River among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. The Compact relies on the Federal Bureau of Reclamation’s operation of an irrigation system called the Rio Grande Project. Under the Compact, New Mexico must deliver a certain amount of water...

Send us Fan Mail Department of State v. Munoz Sandra Munoz is an American citizen who married Luis Ascenio-Cordero -- an El Salvador resident -- in 2010.  He was denied entry into the United States by the consulate in San Salvador.  Generally, these are finally determinations.  But, Munoz, his wife, filed suit, claiming that his denial represented a fundamental liberty interest that was entitled t...

Send us Fan Mail Erlinger v. United States Paul Erlinger pleaded guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm in violation of 18 U. S. C. §922(g). At sentencing, the judge found Mr. Erlinger eligible for an enhanced sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act, §924(e)(1), which increases the penalty for a 922(g) conviction from a maximum sentence of 10 years to a mandatory minimum sentence...

Send us Fan Mail Smith v. Arizona The Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause guarantees a criminal defendant the right to confront the witnesses against him. In operation, the Clause protects a defendant’s right of cross-examination by limiting the prosecution’s ability to introduce statements made by people not in the courtroom. The Clause thus bars the admission at trial of an absent witness’s s...

Send us Fan Mail United States v. Rahimi Respondent Zackey Rahimi was indicted under 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(8), a federal statute that prohibits individuals subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm. A prosecution under Section 922(g)(8) may proceed only if the restraining order meets certain statutory criteria. In particular, the order must either contain a finding t...

Send us Fan Mail Gonzalez v. Trevino The decision of the 5th Circuit is vacated and remanded for further proceedings.  Gonzalez was 72 years old, when in 2019, she was elected to a seat on her local City Council in Texas.  She collected signatures for a petition trying to get the City Manager removed.  There was a long debate at the meeting about this topic.  The Mayor asked for the petition at th...

Send us Fan Mail Moore v. United States Congress generally taxes the income of American business entities in one of two ways. Some entities, such as S corporations and partnerships, are taxed on a pass-through basis, where the entity itself does not pay taxes. 26 U. S. C. §§1361–1362. Instead, the entity’s income is attributed to the shareholders or partners, who then pay taxes on that income even...

Send us Fan Mail Chiaverini v. City of Napoleon This case involves a dispute between petitioner Jascha Chiaverini and police officers from Napoleon, Ohio. The officers charged Chiaverini, a jewelry store owner, with three crimes: receiving stolen property, a misdemeanor; dealing in precious metals without a license, also a misdemeanor; and money laundering, a felony. After obtaining a warrant, the...

Send us Fan Mail  Petitioner Delilah Diaz was stopped at a port of entry on the United States-Mexico border. Border patrol officers searched the car that Diaz was driving and found more than 54 pounds of methamphetamine hidden in the vehicle. Diaz was charged with importing methamphetamine in violation of 21 U. S. C. §§952 and 960, charges that required the Government to prove that Diaz “knowingly...

Send us Fan Mail United States Trustee v. John Q. Hammons Fall 2006, LLC Two Terms ago, in Siegel v. Fitzgerald, 596 U. S. 464, the Court held that a statute violated the Bankruptcy Clause’s uniformity requirement because it permitted different fees for Chapter 11 debtors depending on the district where their case was filed. In this case, the Court is asked to determine the appropriate remedy for...

Send us Fan Mail Campos-Chavez v. Garland To initiate the removal of an alien from the United States who is either “inadmissible” under 8 U. S. C. §1182 or “deportable” under §1227, the Federal Government must provide the alien with “written notice” of the proceedings. §§1229(a)(1), (2). Two types of “written notice” are described in paragraphs (1) and (2) of §1229(a): Paragraph (1) provides that...

Send us Fan Mail  The National Firearms Act of 1934 defines a “machinegun” as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” 26 U. S. C. §5845(b). With a machinegun, a shooter can fire multiple times, or even continuously, by engaging the trigger only once. This c...

Send us Fan Mail FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine In 2000, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug application for mifepristone tablets marketed under the brand name Mifeprex for use in terminating pregnancies up to seven weeks. To help ensure that Mifeprex would be used safely and effectively, FDA placed additional restrictions on the drug’s use and distribution, for example...

Send us Fan Mail   After several Starbucks employees announced plans to unionize, they invited a news crew from a local television station to visit the store after hours to promote their unionizing effort. Starbucks fired multiple employees involved with the media event for violating company policy. The National Labor Relations Board filed an administrative complaint against Starbucks alleging tha...

Send us Fan Mail  Drawing on a 2016 Presidential primary debate exchange between thencandidate Donald Trump and Senator Marco Rubio, respondent Steve Elster sought to federally register the trademark “Trump too small” to use on shirts and hats. An examiner from the Patent and Trademark Office refused registration based on the “names clause,” a Lanham Act prohibition on the registration of a mark t...

Send us Fan Mail  Petitioner Truck Insurance Exchange is the primary insurer for companies that manufactured and sold products containing asbestos. Two of those companies, Kaiser Gypsum Co. and Hanson Permanente Cement (Debtors), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after facing thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits. As part of the bankruptcy process, the Debtors filed a proposed reorganization plan (...