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Monday, May 28, 2007
Law - "More than half the cases the court agrees to hear are not constitutional, but statutory"
Linda Greenhouse of the NY Times has a column today that discusses the importance of the statutory cases the Supreme Court decides to hear:
More than half the cases the court agrees to hear are not constitutional, but statutory, presenting questions much like the one posed by Hackworth v. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, No. 06-1300. To whom does a statute apply? Precisely what behavior does it prohibit? How does it fit with another law on the books that seems to suggest something quite different? * * *Read the column itself for more on the Hackworth case.The 73 cases the court selected for argument during the current term included 41 statutory cases, 27 that raised chiefly constitutional issues and 5 other kinds that raised issues of retroactivity and jurisdiction. (These calculations are subject to interpretation; at the margins, the categories can easily overlap, as when the court is asked to interpret a statute in such a way as to avoid a potential constitutional problem.)
Statutory cases are not necessarily less challenging for the justices or less important to the country than constitutional cases; whether the Clean Air Act applies to global warming, to recall one statutory case from the current term, is a question with more impact than whether a certain type of appeal in patent cases meets the jurisdictional requirements of Article III of the Constitution, to recall another case, this time a constitutional one.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 28, 2007 08:57 AM
Posted to General Law Related