Court Camp continues to be awesome. Today we finished with week two. The highlight of both weeks was getting to to the Court to hear some decisions and then come back later for our own private reception with a very special appearance by a Justice (Roberts for week one and Kagan for week two. Also, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall's wife, who is the best and most hilarious famous person ever.)
When I arrived last Monday morning, the media seemed to think something interesting was going to happen... when I came back on Thursday there were even more cameras. Then when I was back this Monday... even MORE. This picture is from the first Monday.
Justice Kagan, giving the first opinion of the Court, started off with something along the lines of "this issue in this case is sovereign immunity and Indian land. Probably not the case you all came to hear." Everyone laughed. The four cases that were delivered last Monday were interesting to me only because I actually was required to read about them and explain them to the teachers. One of them had a really unexpected 4-4-1 split and came out to 98 pages. This basically means that they spent 98 pages confusing all the lower courts and setting up ways that they can quote themselves in the future when the case comes up again (as it now most certainly will, since a 4-4-1 does not establish a precedent).
I got over the 98 page opinion during the reception.
On Thursday they got rid of all the other cases that I didn't care about. It was still cool to be there, and I was very excited for week two because we were virtually guaranteed to hear a case that we studied during the institute.
This Monday I was in Court again, and as predicted we got two opinions (Miller v. Alabama and Arizona v. United States- as a side note, you can tell something about a case just from the title of the case- the first name listed is always the party that lost in the court directly below the Supreme Court- so Miller and Arizona lost to Alabama and the U.S. in the lower courts. Also, according to statistics for the past decade it is roughly twice as likely for the Court to reverse as it is to affirm a judgment. So now if someone asks what you think will happen in a given case, just say that the first name on the case will win and you'll be right about 70% of the time). The Miller opinion came down almost exactly as expected- a five justice majority decided that mandatory state sentences of life without parole for juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment. Many news outlets are confusing this for a decision that life without parole for juveniles was struck down- this is not true and reflects why it is important to read the decisions carefully.
The Arizona opinion was also mostly expected. The portions of the law that made failure to register as an alien a state misdemeanor and that fined undocumented workers for working in the state (3 and 5(C), respectively) were widely predicted to fail because they represented pretty classic examples of federal/state law conflicts. The striking of section 6, allowing an officer to arrest someone suspected of committing a deportable offense elsewhere, was more of a surprise to me because it seemed to be more of an enforcement action than a law edging in on federal immigration law. Everyone seems very focused on either celebrating or decrying the "show me your papers" provision that was left standing. It is important to recognize that the Court took no action on this simply because on its face it literally does nothing that officers aren't already completely allowed to do. That said, the Court warned Arizona pretty harshly in its opinion that if the provision is applied in a way that violates any aspect of the constitution (racial profiling would do this) they will take the case again and strike it down. A pretty reasonable opinion, I thought.
Scalia's dissenting opinion (which he read from the bench) seemed a bit lazy for him. He first spent a while explaining how the government didn't get its immigration legislative powers from the Constitution (the "naturalization" clause is often pointed to as the source of this power, but he decided that the decades-old interpretation of that clause to also apply to immigration was incorrect) and then conceded that the government did inherently have the power to control immigration (as do the states) and that the federal law would preempt any state law through the "supremacy" clause. Then he explained why the Arizona law didn't conflict with federal law. In other words, the entire first half of his opinion didn't seem to really have anything to do with his analysis as to why the law should have been upheld. If the government has the authority to enact immigration laws, then they have the authority- regardless of the origins of the authority. It was, as is always the case with Scalia dissents, a fun history lesson at the very least.
So now everyone is looking forward to Thursday, when it is expected that the healthcare decision will come down. I picked a good summer to do nothing but current term Supreme Court research.
No comments:
Post a Comment