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Supreme Court opens pivotal term with Trump nominee in place
Attorney News |
2017/10/17 01:38
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Disputes over a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and partisan electoral maps top the Supreme Court's agenda in the first full term of the Trump presidency. Conservatives will look for a boost from the newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, in a year that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said will be momentous.
President Donald Trump's travel ban appears likely to disappear from the court's docket, at least for now. But plenty of high-profile cases remain.
The justices will hear important cases that touch on gay rights and religious freedoms, the polarized American electorate, the government's ability to track people without search warrants, employees' rights to band together over workplace disputes and states' rights to allow betting on professional and college sporting events.
Last year, "they didn't take a lot of major cases because they didn't want to be deadlocked 4-to-4," said Eric Kasper, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. "This year, that problem doesn't present itself."
Gorsuch quickly showed he would be an ally of the court's most conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, most recently joining them in objecting to the court's decision to block an execution in Georgia.
While justices can change over time, Gorsuch's presence on the bench leaves liberals with a fair amount of trepidation, especially in cases involving the rights of workers.
The very first case of the term, set for arguments Monday, could affect tens of millions of workers who have signed clauses as part of their employment contracts that not only prevent them from taking employment disputes to federal court, but also require them to arbitrate complaints individually, rather than in groups. |
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Australia's High Court to consider fate of 7 lawmakers
Attorney News |
2017/10/10 18:30
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Australia's prime minister said Monday that he was confident that government lawmakers would win a court challenge this week that threatens his administration's slender majority.
Seven High Court judges will decide whether seven lawmakers should be disqualified from Parliament because of a constitutional ban on dual citizens being elected. The three-day hearing begins Tuesday.
The fate of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is most crucial to the government in an unprecedented political crisis.
If the court rules that he was illegally elected in July last year due to New Zealand citizenship he unknowingly inherited from his father, the ruling conservative coalition could lose its single-seat majority in the House of Representatives, where governments are formed.
Joyce could stand in a by-election, having renounced his Kiwi citizenship. But with the government unpopular in opinion polls, voters in his rural electoral division could take the opportunity to throw both the deputy prime minister and his administration out of office.
Two of the six senators under a cloud are government ministers. Fiona Nash inherited British citizenship from her father and Matt Canavan became an Italian through an Australian-born mother with Italian parents. Disqualified senators can be replaced by members of the same party without need for an election.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has given no indication of what his government would do if the court rules against any of the three ministers.
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Ohio taxpayers lose right to take disputes to high court
Attorney News |
2017/10/09 01:38
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Ohioans lost the right Friday to appeal disputed tax decisions directly to the state’s high court, a scarcely debated policy change that critics say will have sweeping consequences for businesses, individuals and governments.
The Ohio Supreme Court advocated for and defends the change, arguing it was necessary to lighten its docket of a flood of market-driven property tax disputes and to preserve its role as arbiter of the state’s most significant legal questions.
Administrative Director Mike Buenger said the Supreme Court is intended to deal with categories of cases that are of great statewide public importance or of constitutional magnitude.
“We started looking at these cases because there was concern by the court that many of them presented basic disputes over mathematic valuations and calculations, and often little more than that,” he said. “With limited exception, these cases did not present great questions of statewide importance.”
A court analysis found that only 14 of the 152 appeals of Ohio Board of Tax Appeals decisions the court was compelled to accept in 2014 involved matters of law appropriate for the high court’s attention.
Justices took their concerns to the Ohio Senate, which quietly slipped language into the state budget bill signed in June removing the court’s obligation to accept direct tax appeals - an option since 1939 - and sending them through the appellate courts first.
Business groups pushed back, arguing that sending tax appeals through regional appellate courts would add costs, inconsistency and competitive disadvantages to Ohio’s tax system.
“The impact will be extremely negative. Over time, it will erode the uniformity of the tax code in the state of Ohio,” said Tom Zaino, a Columbus tax attorney and former state tax commissioner under Republican Gov. Bob Taft. “It’s going to be equally bad for government as it is for taxpayers.”
Zaino said his business tax clients often have more than one location and eliminating direct Supreme Court appeals will lead to decisions that are applicable in only one part of the state, to some but not all of a business’ properties or to one competitor but not another. |
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Court: Utility, not gov't responsible for Fukushima disaster
Attorney News |
2017/10/07 01:36
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A Japanese court has ruled that a utility, not the government, should pay compensation to dozens of former residents of Fukushima for losses to their livelihood caused by meltdowns at a nuclear plant after a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
Chiba District Court ordered Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Friday to pay a total of 376 million yen ($3.4 million) to most of the 45 plaintiffs who sought compensation over the loss of their livelihoods and communities because of radiation contamination.
The court dismissed the plaintiffs' claim the government should also be held responsible for its failure to enforce tsunami safety measures.
About 30 other compensation suits filed by tens of thousands of former Fukushima residents are still pending.
The wrecked Fukushima plant's decommissioning is expected to take decades.
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Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor to speak in Tuscaloosa
Attorney News |
2017/10/03 01:35
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U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor will speak at the University of Alabama law school next month.
Sotomayor will participate in a discussion with dean Mark Brandon and U.S. District Judge Harold Albritton III on Sept. 12. Brandon says in a statement the school is honored to have her.
Former President Barack Obama appointed Sotomayor to the court in 2009. The New York native served on federal district and circuit courts before that.
Alabama isn’t an Ivy League university, but it has had a lot of success in luring Supreme Court justices to speak at its law school. Eleven justices have spoken in Tuscaloosa since a lecture series began in 1996.
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