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Saturday, August 01, 2009

Courts - Two interesting SCOTUS stories

"Supreme Court Appoints Advocate to Argue Immigration Case" writes Tony Mauro for The National Law Journal. The story begins:

As we reported here last year, one of the little-known paths a lawyer can take to achieving the goal of arguing before the Supreme Court comes when a party decides it no longer wants to argue in favor of or against a lower court decision that is on appeal. When that happens, half the case falls away, so to speak. The Supreme Court, if it still wants an airing of the issue at stake, then appoints a lawyer -- almost always a former law clerk to a justice -- to advance the now-orphaned argument.

It happens rarely, once every year or so, and it happened again Thursday. The Court issued an order Thursday appointing Amanda Leiter, a professor at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law and former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens, to argue in favor of the decision below in an immigration case, Kucana v. Holder. Ordinarily, since the U.S. government is the respondent, the solicitor general's office would be making that argument. But Solicitor General Elena Kagan in her brief in the case agreed with petitioner Agron Kucana, an Albanian facing deportation, that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was wrong. With no one supporting the 7th Circuit, the Court appointed Leiter.

"Supreme Court Asked to Take Certified Question for Only Fifth Time in Six-Plus Decades" writes Marcia Coyle for The National Law Journal. The story begins:
A federal appellate court recently focused attention on a rare method of obtaining review by the U.S. Supreme Court when it certified a question to the justices in the high-profile prosecution of James Ford Seale for the 1964 kidnapping-murder of two black teenagers.

The question that troubled the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals: Although Seale committed the crime in 1964, he was not prosecuted until 2007. Did the law require the prosecution for kidnapping within five years of the crime, or is there no time limit? A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit ruled last September that because of changes in the law in 1972, the clock ran out on the government's prosecution of Seale.

Voting en banc, the 5th Circuit divided evenly on the question, and then voted 12-6 to certify it to the Supreme Court. The "certificate of question" was filed Thursday.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 1, 2009 03:20 PM
Posted to Courts in general