Tag Archives: Judiciary

John Roberts is …

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John Roberts is displeased. John Roberts is exasperated. John Roberts is frustrated. John Roberts is annoyed. John Roberts is irked. John Roberts is any other of the many synonyms my thesaurus suggested instead of the word I originally used, which it found to be “vulgar.”

What has the Chief Justice of the United States in high dudgeon (I thought of that one myself) is the reaction to the Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which drove a stake through the heart of the only section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the Court had not previously decimated. With the vote falling along party lines, many critics condemned the decision as racist and political.

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The Supremes Über Alles

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In my two previous columns (here and here) I detailed some of the winners and losers resulting from the opinions issued during the Supreme Court term just ended. Now let us look at the biggest winner of them all, the Supreme Court itself. In the last three weeks of the term, the Supreme Court transferred much of regulatory and administrative authority and rulemaking to itself. The federal courts were not authorized and are not equipped to serve as roving regulators of last resort for hundreds of federal agencies. According to the Court:

  • Judges know more about science than scientists.
  • Judges know more about medicine than doctors.
  • Judges know more about structural safety than engineers.
  • Judges know more about climate change than meteorologists.
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The Supreme’s Trainwreck

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Every summer professors at the nation’s law schools huddle to discuss what, if any, changes should be made to their teaching curriculum after the Supreme Court term just ended. This year, they are scrambling to deal with the train wreck for constitutional law that was the Court’s 2023-2024 term.

I am not a lawyer. But after fifty years as a journalist, I am spending my emeritus years in part teaching a course titled “Media Law and Ethics for Journalists” in the UCLA Extension program. This is a required course in the school’s journalism certificate program and is available online.

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The Supremes Vote Trump

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The six members of the conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court cast their ballots for Donald Trump on the last day of the court term, then ran out of town to begin their standard three months’ long vacation.

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