Giving a talk at UCLA. She also missed Court’s session on Monday to appear at U.C. Irvine.
Recall that Justice Sotomayor asked Vice President Biden to reschedule his inauguration so she could go to New York for a book signing and appear on The Daily Show (see here, here, here, and here).
I’m sure Justice Alito stayed home, and was yelling at his TV when POTUS referenced Shelby County.
Another last ditch effort to save the 8th Wonder of the World:
The endangered Astrodome was thrown a possible lifeline as the National Park Service named the world’s first domed athletic stadium to its National Register of Historic Places.
The designation granted Thursday does not prevent Harris County from demolishing the building, but does open federal and state tax incentives for rehabilitation. The stadium, opened in 1965, long was called the “eighth wonder of the world.”
“We’d say, ‘hey great!’ but it doesn’t impede our ability as far as demolition goes,” said Joe Stinebaker, spokesman for Harris County Judge Ed Emmett. “The Dome’s status is in limbo. No decision to demolish it or rehabilitate it has been made.
On a recent trip to Phoenix, I visited Arizona’s historical Supreme Court Chamber where Miranda v. Arizona was argued.
Here are the lineup photo, booking sheet, and mug shot of Miranda:
This is Miranda with his lawyer, the legendary John Flynn.
This is Carroll Colley, one of the two detectives who interrogated Miranda.
The blog of the Maricopa County Bar Association has a great piece about the history of Miranda v. Arizona, with a focus on Ernesto Miranda. Here is a taste:
Miranda started working nights as a driver and warehouseman at United Produce Co. at 3rd Street and Madison in the late summer of 1962. Before and after work and before heading home to his girlfriend and new baby in Mesa, he would hang out in the “Deuce.” The downtown area around 2nd Street that would later become Symphony Hall was renowned for its seedy flophouses, rough bars and generally openly illicit atmosphere. Only a few blocks to the west were the old Maricopa County Courthouse, the Phoenix Title and Trust Building and the Paramount Theatre. All would play important parts in Miranda becoming a household name.
As a teenager, Miranda had been accused of the attempted rape of a married woman, was dishonorably discharged from the Army for being a “Peeping Tom,” and later served time in federal prison for transporting stolen vehicles across state lines. The young felon was about 5’ 9” and weighed around 170 pounds. He had dark curly hair, wore black-rimmed glasses and had a variety of tattoos, including a large naked woman on his right leg. One doctor diagnosed him as having a chronic, undifferentiated schizophrenic reaction and another described his condition as a sociopathic personality disturbance. In general, though, he was described as neat, clean, cooperative, and a little shy.
In the months after he was hired in the produce warehouse, Miranda was linked to several downtown purse snatchings, an armed robbery (purportedly using a fingernail file) and finally, the kidnapping and rape of an 18-year-old named Patricia.
Finally, please listen to this JoshCast I recorded with the Prosecutor who retried Miranda on remand from the Supreme Court.
In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the United States government made representations to the Court that if the steel workers went on strike, there would be a significant impact on the war effort, and that Americans in theater would die. We all know how the case turned out. The Court ruled that Truman could not seize the steel mills. But do you know what happened afterwards? Minutes after Sawyer relinquished control of the mills, the steel workers went on strike. And they stayed on strike for 50 days (longer than the entire steel seizure litigation took!). In case you couldn’t tell, the war effort continued. It’s unclear if the generals knew that things wouldn’t be quite this bad. (As an aside, Truman could have sough to enjoin the strike through the Taft-Hartley Act, but did not want to punish labor. If things were that dire, he could’ve done that).
I asked my students, what are we to make of a government’s representations made during wartime? Let’s put aside Justice Jackson’s memorable framework of how closely we scrutinize an executive’s claim of powers in light of his conjunction or disjunction with Congress. What is the government’s track record about making accurate claims regarding national security during times of war?
In the present day, we know that James Clapper made misrepresentations (you can call them lies if you’d like) to Congress about the scope of the surveillance program. During the Bush Administration, officials routinely misled Congress about the scope of terrorism programs.
And of course, the grand-daddy of them all is Korematsu. As Adam Liptak notes in this recent column, the government flat out lied to the Supreme Court regarding the threat of Japanese Americans in the United States. Then-acting SG Neal Katyal issued a “Confession of Error” for the SG’s lies represented to the Court. All that is great 70 years later. But at the time, the Court relied on those positions.
So, my question is, how should the Courts trust arguments made by the government during wartime? I understand that understanding issues of national security is outside the expertise of the courts. However, the government’s track record of being fair and frank with the court, especially when troops are in theater, has been less-than-perfect.
A new article looks how the “changing discourse of the Supreme Court,” and uses two points of comparison: the 1930s and today. Here is the abstract:
Academics, judges and other commentators complain that, for the past few decades, the Justices on the Supreme Court have been increasingly writing opinions that are unreadable for most Americans. Those critics complain that the opinions are too long and too complex, riddled with incomprehensible multi-part tests. They also attack the style of the opinions and assert that recent opinions are more likely to be written in a technocratic, rather than persuasive, style. There seems to be little consensus among the critics regarding why the Justices are writing opinions that are increasingly unreadable. Some attribute it to the increasing complexity of issues that the Court is considering. Others suggest that the shift could be attributable to the lack of trial court experience among Justices.
In response to the criticisms, a few academics have conducted empirical research to determine whether certain opinions of the Supreme Court are more readable than other opinions. The authors of those studies have also attempted to identify factors that might influence the readability of an opinion, including (1) whether the opinion is a majority or dissenting opinion; (2) the number of Justices joining the opinion; (3) the ideology of the Justice authoring the opinion; and (4) the subject matter of the underlying dispute.
None of the studies, however, have examined whether the Court’s opinions have, in general, become less readable over time, as many critics assert. The attached article compares the readability of the opinions issued by the Supreme Court in the 1931, 1932, and 1933 terms to the opinions issued by the Court in the 2009, 2010, and 2011 terms. Since some commentators have suggested that the obfuscation of Supreme Court opinions is related to the increasing complexity of issues that the Court is addressing, it seemed logical to compare the readability of the Court’s opinions from the 1930’s, at a time before the “staturification” of law, and the expansion of federal administrative programs during the New Deal, to the modern opinions. In addition to exploring whether the Court’s opinions have become less readable, this article also examines whether factors identified in other studies, such as the opinion type or the subject matter in dispute, correlate to the readability of the Court’s opinions, either in the 1930’s or today, and whether that has changed over time. Finally, the article examines which Justices, in the 1930s and today, wrote the most readable and least readable opinions.
The data reviewed confirm that the Court’s opinions today are significantly longer and less readable than the opinions from the 1930s, but it is not necessarily related to the “statutorification” of law or the expansion of federal administrative programs. It may, however, be related to a change in the culture of the Court that began in the 1940s, the proliferation of concurring and dissenting opinions. The data confirmed the findings of earlier studies that opinions addressing criminal law are generally the most readable, although they are significantly less readable today than they were in the 1930s. Opinions addressing administrative law and statutory law issues were the least readable in the 1930s and today. With respect to individual Justices, Justices Kagan and Cardozo wrote the most readable opinions for their respective time periods, while Justices Sotomayor and Stone wrote the least readable opinions.
That sounds about right. I am gaga for Lady Kaga’s writing.
H/T Legal History Blog
