At the WSJ Law Blog this morning, Ashby Jones previews McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which the Court will examine the constitutionality of a Chicago gun-control ordinance and, more generally, the Second Amendment’s applicability to the states. The petitioners, in a brief filed this week, rely on the ...

Below, Elisabeth Oppenheimer of Stanford Law School previews Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection (08-1151), which will be heard by the Supreme Court on Wednesday, December 2. Check the Stop the Beach Renourishment SCOTUSwiki page for additional updates. On ...

For those that use empirical data to study the Supreme Court, the new Supreme Court Database is now live at supremecourtdatabase.org. The biggest advantage to the new version of the Database is that it is now more user-friendly and accessible to those who study the Court, but may not have empirical ...

This edition of “Petitions to Watch” features cases up for consideration at the Justices’ next private conference on Tuesday, November 24. As always, it lists the petitions on the Court’s paid docket that Tom has deemed to have a reasonable chance of being granted. Links to all previous editions are ...

Linda Greenhouse has an article in the Charleston Law Review’s Supreme Court Preview issue (starting at page 37) in which she assesses Justice Breyer’s jurisprudence on the Court, at the presumed midpoint of his tenure there. Greenhouse writes that Breyer is the “quintessential Enlightenment Supreme ...

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to leave undisturbed a lower court ruling that limits the government’s power to keep secret photos or documents that reveal official wrongdoing. Thus, the ACLU argued in a new brief, the Court should deny a Pentagon request to vacate ...

Roll Call (subscription only) has an editorial by Simon Lazarus in which he argues that Congress is pushing back against recent Court decisions that encroach on Congress’s domain. Lazarus cites four examples of legislation Congress introduced to reverse the Court’s decisions and a fiery reproach of ...

Posing a major test of the sweeping scope of the government’s most-used legal weapon against “terrorism,” six groups and two individuals urged the Supreme Court on Monday to pare down key provisions of the USA Patriot Act. The government interprets those provisions so broadly, the new merits brief argued, ...

The Court’s decision not to review a challenge by a Native American group to the Washington Redskins mascot leads Monday’s coverage. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, and the hometown Washington Post all report on the Court’s denial of cert. in Harjo v. Pro-Football Inc. Although this challenge ...

With a strong plea to revive the Constitution’s ill-fated Privileges or Immunities Clause, lawyers for four Chicagoans told the Supreme Court on Monday that history shows clearly that the Second Amendment’s protection of personal gun rights applies to state and local laws as fully as to those at the ...