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Posted 06 Apr 2016 in Case Notes, IMLA Briefs
In a 6-2 decision the Supreme Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel includes allowing a criminal defendant to use untainted substitute assets to hire an attorney, rather than freezing them for forfeiture to the government after conviction.  The State and Local Legal Center (SLLC) filed an amicus brief arguing for the opposite result in Luis v. United States. State and local governments—police departments in particular—receive criminal asset forfeitures. Any many state forfeiture statutes allow freezing of substitute assets.

Posted 04 Apr 2016 in Case Notes
In what has been described as the most important “one-person, one-vote” case since the Supreme Court adopted the principle over 50 years ago, the Court held that states may apportion state legislative districts based on total population. Local governments may do the same.   The Court’s opinion in Evenwel v. Abbott is unanimous. All 50 states currently use total population to design state legislative districts; only seven adjust the census numbers “in any meaningful way.”  

Posted 29 Mar 2016 in Case Notes
Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association could have turned public sector labor law upside down. In an unsurprising move the Supreme Court issued a non-precedential 4-4 opinion affirming the lower court’s decision by an equally divided Court. This opinion continues the status quo. Had Justice Scalia not died in February this case almost certainly would have had a different outcome. 

Posted 22 Mar 2016 in Case Notes, Commentary
In a per curiam (unauthored) opinion, which concurring Justices Alito and Thomas call “grudging,” the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to decide again whether Massachusetts’s stun gun ban is constitutional. Currently eight states and a handful of cities and counties ban stun guns.  The highest state court in Massachusetts held that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect stun guns because they weren’t in common use at the time the Second Amendment was enacted, they are “unusual” as “a thoroughly modern invention,” and they aren’t readily adaptable for use in the military.

Posted 16 Mar 2016 in Commentary
As promised, President Obama has nominated someone to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.  If this wasn’t an election year Merrick Garland would be a surprising choice. He is known as a moderate, is older (63), a white male, and has been a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for almost 20 years. If it wasn’t an election year Senate Republicans would probably be racing to confirm him.

Posted 15 Mar 2016 in Case Notes
On March 10, 2016, the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, Division Eight (LA), published an opinion in Lamar Central Outdoor, LLC v. City of Los Angeles (Mar. 10, 2016, B260074) __ Cal.App.4th ___, a case involving another round in the continuing litigation between outdoor advertising companies and the City of Los Angeles over “offsite signs”—billboards with commercial messages in locations other than at a property owner’s business.  In 2002, the city established a permanent ban, with some exceptions, on new offsite signs, including a ban on alterations of legally existing offsite signs. A few years later, the city banned offsite signs with digital displays. The Los Angeles Municipal Code “prohibits signs if they ‘[a]re off-site signs, including off-site digital displays, except when off-site signs are specifically permitted pursuant to a relocation agreement’” and also prohibits “alterations, enlargements or conversions to digital displays of legally existing off-site signs, except for alterations that conform to . . . this Code.”  (LAMC, § 14.4.4.B.11.)

Posted 02 Mar 2016 in Commentary
In a 2-1 decision the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it—rather than a federal district court—has jurisdiction to decide whether the Clean Water Rule, clarifying the scope of the “waters of the United States (WOTUS),” exceeds the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority.  In October the Sixth Circuit assumed it had jurisdiction and issued a temporary nationwide stay of the rule. The WOTUS rule defines “waters the United States,” according to the EPA, “through increased use of bright-line boundaries” to make “the process of identifying waters protected under the Clean Water Act easier to understand, more predictable and consistent with the law and peer reviewed science, while protecting the streams and wetlands that form the foundation of our nation’s water resources.”  The Sixth Circuit stayed the rule concluding it was likely that a number of the definitions were at odds with Rapanos v. United States (2006) and the distance limitations in the final rule weren’t a “logical outgrowth” of the proposed rule, in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.