Case Notes

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Posted 07 Apr 2016 in Case Notes, Roundup
Perhaps the Supreme Court’s midterm has come and gone. The Court will only hear argument in 10 more cases and the term will end June 30. But the Court has issued decisions in less than half of the cases of the term so far. So now might be just the time to take stock of the Supreme Court’s term as it relates to the states.

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 In an unsurprising move the Supreme Court issued a non-precedential 4-4 opinion affirming the lower court’s decision by an equally divided Court.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 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 03 Feb 2016 in Case Notes, Commentary, Roundup
The Friday before and the Tuesday after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day the Supreme Court accepted a total of nine cases, including a challenge to the President’s executive order allowing undocumented parents of children who are citizens to remain in the United States.  United States v. Texas will be heard this term and decided by the end of June. Oral argument will be held next term in some of the other cases accepted mid-January. Four of the eight cases accepted, in addition to the immigration case, affect state and local governments.  While I will write more about each of these cases later, for now, below is a brief synopsis of them.