Live blog of orders and opinions | June 10, 2019
We live-blogged as the Supreme Court released orders from the June 6 conference, adding five new cases to its merits docket for next term, and opinions in three argued cases: Quarles v. U.S., Return Mail v. U.S. Postal Service and Parker Drilling v. Newton. SCOTUSblog is sponsored by Casetext: A more intelligent way to search the law.
3rd & 7 37yd
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Probably the biggest petition, in terms of profile, on last week's conference was Klein v. Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, the case of an Oregon couple who declined on religious grounds to bake a custom wedding cake for a same-sex marriage. The case has been considered at nine consecutive conferences, by my count.
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To go back to the grants, Atlantic Richfield is a case about whether federal law preempts state-law claims for clean-up of hazardous waste beyond what EPA had ordered. The US solicitor general had recommended that review be denied even though it agreed with Atlantic Richfield that the Montana Supreme Court's decision was wrong.
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The petition in al-Alwi was filed by a Yemeni national who has been held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the past 17 years. He had asked the justices to rule, in effect, that the war on terror has gone on so long, and is so different from traditional conflicts, that the Supreme Court should step in and limit the executive branch’s authority to hold prisoners indefinitely.
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Breyer writes that the D.C. Circuit "agreed with the Government that it may continue to detain" al-Alwi "so long as armed hostilities between United States forces and [the Taliban and al-Qaeda] persist. The Government represents that such hostilities are ongoing, but does not state that any end is in sight. As a consequence, al-Alwi faces the real prospect that he will spend the rest of his life in detention based on his status as an enemy combatant a generation ago, even though today's conflict may differ substantially from the one Congress anticipated when it passed the" Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
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Apologies if this is the nth time someone has asked this type of question, but is it reasonable to assume that the Court will decide the Census case either this week or next, given their stated need to have the forms printed by the end of June (if I remember their rationale correctly)?
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(A motion to file an amicus brief only occurs when consent isn't granted by both parties. As long as a request is made prior to 10 days before filing, it is assumed that consent will be granted by both parties without something very unusual concerning the amicus organization. In this case, the request was made less than 10 days prior to the filing date, and so one of the parties declined to respond to the request for consent. So it was up to the court to decide if they were timely or not. The rules are setup to encourage potential amicus brief writers to inform the parties of who will be filing as well as to exclude really crazy organizations (like the american NAZI orgs). Unless something is very unusual is going on, consent is usually given if timely, and if it is not given the Court will grant the motion to file making non-consent in such situations just making the justices annoyed at you.)
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The case involves the Armed Career Criminal Act, which requires at least a 15-year prison sentence for a felon who unlawfully possesses a gun and has three prior convictions for a "serious drug offense" or a "violent felony," with "violent felony" being defined to include "burglary."
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Here's the opinion in Quarles. Rory Little will have our analysis:
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The Court has defined burglary to mean the unlawful entry into or remaining in a building, with the intent to commit a crime. The question is whether a "remaining in" burglary occurs only if a person has the intent to commit a crime at the exact moment when he first remains in a building or instead when he forms the intent to commit a crime at any time while unlawfully remaining in a building. The court today concludes that "remaining-in" burglary occurs when the defendant forms the intent to commit a crime at any time while unlawfully remaining in a building or structure.