Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Is The End Of Roe V. Wade Near? Leaked Scotus Brief Says Yes, Nicole Huberfeld, Linda C. Mcclain

Shorter Faculty Works

Protesters on both sides of the abortion debate descended on the US Supreme Court Monday night and into Tuesday after a leaked secret draft of a US Supreme Court opinion indicated that a majority of justices support overturning Roe v. Wade, after almost 50 years of legalized abortion rights in America. If finalized, possibly as soon as this summer, the bombshell could trigger a cultural tsunami across American life, forcing some women to travel to another state for an abortion and putting the divisive issue at the heart of the fall midterm elections.

“She’S Earned This”: Angela Onwuachi-Willig Rejoices In Historic Confirmation, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University’s School of Law—the first Black woman to be dean of a top-20 law school—is rejoicing. The first Black woman has been confirmed to the US Supreme Court.

Onwuachi-Willig has had Ketanji Brown Jackson’s back from the moment President Biden announced he would nominate the federal judge to the nation’s highest court.

Bu Celebrates Ketanji Brown Jackson’S Rise To Us Supreme Court, Nicole Huberfeld

Shorter Faculty Works

The operative word about Ketanji Brown Jackson is “first.” Once she is sworn in to the US Supreme Court, after being confirmed by the Senate Thursday 53-47 (three Republicans joined Democrats in supporting her), she will be the first Black woman on the high court in its 233 years. And she will be the first former public defender to join the court. Brown Jackson—the daughter of a lawyer and a school principal and currently a federal appellate judge in Washington, D.C.—won Senate confirmation after a bruising hearing last week where Republican senators tried to label her as an extreme liberal …

The Right To Counsel In A Neoliberal Age, Zohra Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholarship tends to obscure how changes in criminal process relate to broader changes in the political and economic terrain. This Article offers a modest corrective to this tendency. By studying the U.S. Supreme Court’s right to counsel jurisprudence, as it has developed since the mid-70s, I show the pervasive impact of the concurrent rise of neoliberalism on relationships between defendants and their attorneys. Since 1975, the Court has emphasized two concerns in its rulings regarding the right to counsel: choice and autonomy. These, of course, are nominally good things for defendants to have. But by paying close attention to …

Is A Locomotive In Use And Therefore Subject To Locomotive Inspection Act Liability When It Makes A Temporary Stop?, Anne Marie Lofaso

Law Faculty Scholarship

Case at a Glance: LeDure v. Union Pacific Railroad Company. Bradley LeDure, a long-time locomotive engineer for Union Pacific, slipped on the slick surface of a locomotive while it was idle but powered on, seriously injuring himself. If Union Pacific violated safety regulations under the Locomotive Inspection Act, then it would be negligent per se. But that theory of liability is only available if the locomotive was in use at the time of the accident. The case presents a question of statutory interpretation of the term use.

Law Dean’S Letter Urges Confirmation Of Biden’S Historic Scotus Pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

In a letter citing Black women’s underrepresentation on the federal bench, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of the BU School of Law, and more than 200 other Black women law deans and professors urged the US Senate on Friday to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the nation’s highest court “swiftly and with bipartisan support.”

How Practices Make Principles, And How Principles Make Rules, Mitchell N. Berman

All Faculty Scholarship

The most fundamental question in general jurisprudence concerns what makes it the case that the law has the content that it does. This article offers a novel answer. According to the theory it christens “principled positivism,” legal practices ground legal principles, and legal principles determine legal rules. This two-level account of the determination of legal content differs from Hart’s celebrated theory in two essential respects: in relaxing Hart’s requirement that fundamental legal notions depend for their existence on judicial consensus; and in assigning weighted contributory legal norms—“principles”—an essential role in the determination of legal rights, duties, powers, and permissions. Drawing …

The Chief Justice And The Page: Earl Warren, Charles Bush, And The Promise Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

In October Term 1954, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding the implementation of the Brown decision. The resulting opinion is commonly referred to as “Brown II.” In his unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered local school districts to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Supporters of immediate integration were dismayed by the vague language, which ultimately allowed southern states to use a variety of tactics to deliberately evade and resist the Court’s mandate that public schools be desegregated.

What has been forgotten in the discussion of Brown II and the “all deliberate speed” standard is that …

Gertrude Jenkins, Unplugged, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

Gertrude Jenkins worked for U.S. Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone until his death in 1946. Adept at multi-tasking, she also ran a boarding house to make more money. A position as a floating secretary was created for Jenkins at the Court, and she worked in other chambers as well as the Court library until October 1949, when she accepted a position in Justice Frankfurter’s chambers. Jenkins retired in August 1953.

Gertrude Jenkins’s letters neither shed light on the grand constitutional issues of her day nor provide insights into the justices’ jurisprudential views. They will not cause historians to radically reevaluate …

Facts Versus Discretion: The Debate Over Immigration Adjudication, Jayanth K. Krishnan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently issued her first majority-led immigration opinion in Patel v. Garland (2022). As background, some immigrants looking to avoid deportation may apply for what is called “discretionary relief’ (e.g., asylum or adjustment of status) initially in an immigration court and then, if they lose, at the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). These immigration forums fall under the Department of Justice. Prior to Patel, immigrants who lost at the BIA could then ask a federal circuit court to review the factual findings of their case. Now, after Justice Barrett’s decision, Article III review is no longer available …

Democracy And Disenchantment, Ashraf Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

During the latter half of the Trump presidency, as it became increasingly clear that the Supreme Court would remain solidly conservative for the foreseeable future, Samuel Moyn and Ryan Doerfler declared war. In popular and scholarly venues, they have steadily built a case for curtailing the power of the nation’s highest court. Their arguments have been both pragmatic and principled. They have underlined, for instance, the risks the Roberts Court poses to progressive goals such as addressing climate change1 and granting student debt relief. More broadly, they object to a “supra-democratic court exercising its current, expansive legislative veto.” For Doerfler …

Riding To The Rescue: The Conditional Spending And Commandeering Jurisprudence Of Sandra Day O’Connor In An Era Of Federal Overreach, Meryl Justin Chertoff

SALPAL Papers & Reports

No abstract provided.

Seila Law: Is There A There There?, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

In Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, invalidated the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act restricting the president's removal of the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to cases of "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The Court's decision leaves the director subject to removal by the president for any reason or no reason at all.

This Essay on the Seila Law decision makes three points. First, because there is no legal or historical support for the Court's distinction between independent agencies headed …