U.S. Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court will not take up Argentina's appeal over a judgment requiring it to pay investors in its defaulted bonds, Agence France-Presse reports. The investors refused to participate in the restructuring of the debt on which Argentina defaulted in 2001.

One issue was whether Argentina has to turn over information about its government assets held in the United States, and the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act does not protect foreign countries from the discovery of their assets, AFP reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari in a criminal case involving the free speech rights of a criminal defendant who used threatening language in the form of rap lyrics on Facebook, the Associated Press reports.  (I covered the trial of Anthony Elonis when I worked for the Legal Intelligencer, Pennsylvania's legal newspaper.)

Federal prosecutors successfully got the district judge to apply an objective standard for the jurors to decide if Elonis' posts were threatening, but Elonis' counsel argued that a subjective standard should have been applied, AP reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that "true threats" are not protected speech, AP also reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that two conservative groups have standing to challenge an Ohio law that penalizes false statements made about political candidates, Reuters' Lawrence Hurley reports. The challenge can be pursued even though the Ohio Elections Commission has not said whether it would seek to penalize Susan B. Anthony List and another group. Here is coverage I did for the Supreme Court Review podcast of the oral arguments in the case: http://supremecourtreview.com/default/podcast/view/id/76

If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the theory that share prices reflect all publicly available information and that there is a fraud on the market when corporations misrepresent the truth publicly, major companies in the banking, pharmaceutical and casino industries would benefit, Reuters reports.

At least during oral argument, it seemed that the justices weren't in favor of completely overthrowing the fraud on the market theory: and were seeking "to find a middle ground that would require plaintiffs to show that the misrepresentation had a significant effect on the stock price but that would not overturn [the court's prior precedent] Basic [v. Levinson]. During oral arguments, some of the justices appeared to signal that the middle option would be their preference," Reuters further reports.

Law professor Ingrid Wuerth, writing in Lawfare, says that the U.S. Supreme Court showed in its recent ruling in Bond v. United States that Chief Justice Roberts' court  is showing less deference to the executive branch in interpreting foreign relations matters.

At issue was a woman's conviction under an international chemical-weapons treaty when she put an arsenic-based poison on the mailbox of her husband's lover. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the defendant was improperly convicted under the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act. 

"In making that determination in Bond, the Court afforded no deference to the government’s interpretation of the implementing legislation. Indeed, in Bond the Court’s rejection of the government’s interpretation of the statute was strained, as Justice Scalia argued in his concurring opinion," Wuerth said.

David Zvenyach, GC to the Council of the District of Columbia, is using an application written in JavaScript to crawl the U.S. Supreme Court's opinions to find changes made without notice to the public, Gigaom reports.

The New York Times' Adam Liptak recently reported on how the justices are surreptiously changing their opinions after they have been issued, sometimes replacing language with something entirely different.

Changes will be tweeted out to @Scotus-servo.

A federal judge in Idaho, while upholding the National Security Agency's surveillance program of telephone records because of legal precedent, urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the surveillance is unconstitutional, the Wall Street Journal reported: Judge B. Lynn "Winmill said there is a 'looming gulf'' between a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that allowed the government to gather the phone records of a single suspect, and the NSA program that collects millions of phone records of Americans to build a searchable database, including the time, duration, and numbers dialed. The program doesn't gather the content of calls."

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal of New York Times' reporter James Risen over a lower court ruling that he must identify his confidential source for a national security story, Risen's colleague Adam Liptak reports. Risen could face jail if he refuses to comply with the court order. While the Obama administration said in its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that there is no evidentiary privilege for reporters not to identify confidential sources who have broken the law, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. hinted that federal prosecutors may not ask for Risen to be jailed for contempt if he refuses to testify, Liptak further reports.

Political scientist Norm Ornstein suggests that term limiting Supreme Court justices would unlock the current gridlock in Washington, David Harsanyl, an editor at The Federalist and writing in Reason, says. But Harsanyl suggests that "no independent observer (if one exists) could convincingly argue that Chief Justice John Roberts is more 'partisan' than Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg." Harsanyl still thinks it's a good idea to have lifetime service so justices are more likley to be "impervious to the fleeting populist bugaboos and contemporary preferences."

The U.S. Supreme Court has 25 pending cases to decide before recessing for the summer, including a case on the president's power to appoint officials during Congressional pro forma recesses, The New American's Joe Wolverton II reports. The D.C. Circuit held that recess appointments violate the constitutional requirement that officials be appointed with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate, but Attorney General Eric Holder argues that the Senate was unavailable to receive communications from the president when engaged in pro forma sessions in which no real action was being taken by senators. Wolverton, writing from a conservative point of view, argues that the Founding Father Alexander Hamilton thought the Constitution required that cooperation of the Senate and that recess appointments were only meant to be temporary.