Supreme Court

This morning, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Torres v.

I traveled to Cleveland this week to participate in the Case Western Law Review's symposium on the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court's major traffic stop decision, Whren v. United States. The decision let stand a criminal conviction based on a traffic stop that appears to have been based on race.  The participants considered whether the Whren decision has resulted in systematic racial bias in the criminal justice system.

On Wednesday, September 23, I presented the annual Anthony Kennedy Lecture at the Lewis & Clark Law School.  The subject of my talk was "Liberty or Equality?", and the topic was Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in the recent Obergefell case, recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The Supreme Court's protection of corporate political expenditures in Citizens United v. FEC and corporate religious exercise in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby has rekindled perennial fears about the influence of corporations in U.S. politics and policy. One popular response has been to argue for stripping corporations of constitutional rights.

Professor Peter Lee, a leading scholar of patent law, has a new article that will be published in the Michigan Law Review next year. The article is titled "The Supreme Assimilation of Patent Law," and it presents a descriptive theory of Supreme Court patent jurisprudence.

Here is the abstract:

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court provided Moones Mellouli, a lawful permanent resident who had been ordered removed from the United States, with a victory in his efforts to reverse a removal order.  The Court held that "[f]ederal law ([8 U.S.C.] 1227(a)(2)(B)(i)  . . . did not authorize Mellouli's removal." It did not remand the case to the court of appeals or the Board of Immigration Appeals for further proceedings, thereby suggesting that the case had come to an end.  Nonetheless, there now is a squabble between Mellouli and the U.S.

Display of the Confederate battle flag on government-owned property has certainly gotten a lot of attention of late. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 a few weeks ago, in Walker v.

Today, a splintered Supreme Court issued a ruling in Kerry v. Din.  The case raised the question of the continuing vitality of the doctrine of consular non-reviewability and its prohibition of judicial review of visa denials by Department of State consular officers.

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down two cases, Elonis v. United States and EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, that had received a lot of press in earlier stages of the litigations and that, judging from the briefs, posed important civil rights issues concerning freedom of speech and freedom of religion, respectively.

Today, the Supreme Court decided Mellouli v. Lynch, a case involving the removal from the United States of Moones Mellouli, a lawful permanent resident from Tunisia, based on a Kansas misdemeanor drug paraphernalia conviction for possession of a sock used to hide four tablets of the prescription drug Adderall.