Legal Random, Random

[ponchi101]

I don't know if I would want my lawyer to be a coward.

[dryrunguy]

The NY Times is reporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is being returned to the US from El Salvador to face charges of transporting undocumented migrants. Apparently the indictment was filed with a federal court in Tennessee.

[ti-amie]

The NY Times is reporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is being returned to the US from El Salvador to face charges of transporting undocumented migrants. Apparently the indictment was filed with a federal court in Tennessee.

The people who are literally snatching people off of the streets of this country are going to charge one of the people they snatched with what they're doing.

[ti-amie]

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/ ... e-35371178

[ponchi101]

Nature's law.
Go tell bonobos (or any other primates) that gay sex and relations are not "nature's law".
I don't mind the position as much as I mind the stupidity.
(I can understand the position because their guidebook says so, so they just simply follow it).

[ti-amie]

Judge denies government's motion to detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. after being mistakenly deported.

By Laura Romero
June 22, 2025, 6:51 PM ET
• 1 min read

A magistrate judge in Tennessee has denied the government's motion to detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the mistakenly deported Salvadoran native who was brought back to the United States earlier this month.

In her order on Sunday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes said the court "will give Abrego the due process that he is guaranteed."

Judge Holmes scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to review the conditions of release.

Abrego Garcia faces criminal charges for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S.

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/jud ... =123105021

[ti-amie]

Anna Bower

‪@annabower.bsky.social‬
Today, a DOJ lawyer confirmed that the U.S. plans to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he’s released from pre-trial criminal detention.

The lawyer said the government won’t wait until Abrego faces trial.

Less than two weeks ago, a White House deputy press secretary decried that as “fake news.”

[dryrunguy]

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Makes Herself Heard, Prompting a Rebuke
In solo dissents this term, the justice accused the conservative majority of lawless bias. On the term’s last day, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fired back.

By Adam Liptak

Reporting from Washington

July 5, 2025

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote just five majority opinions in the Supreme Court term that ended last month, the fewest of any member of the court. But her voice resonated nonetheless, in an unusually large number of concurring and dissenting opinions, more than 20 in all.

Several of them warned that the court was taking lawless shortcuts, placing a judicial thumb on the scale in favor of President Trump and putting American democracy in peril. She called the majority’s opinion in the blockbuster case involving birthright citizenship, issued on the final day of the term, “an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Justice Jackson, 54, is the court’s newest member, having just concluded her third term. Other justices have said it took them years to find their footing, but Justice Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court, quickly emerged as a forceful critic of her conservative colleagues and, lately, their approach to the Trump agenda.

Her opinions, sometimes joined by no other justice, have been the subject of scornful criticism from the right and have raised questions about her relationships with her fellow justices, including the other two members of its liberal wing.

“She’s breaking the fourth wall, speaking beyond the court,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University. “She is alarmed at what the court is doing and is sounding that in a different register, one that is less concerned with the appearance of collegiality and more concerned with how the court appears to the public.”

Her slashing critiques sometimes seemed to test her colleagues’ patience, culminating in an uncharacteristic rebuke from Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the case arising from Mr. Trump’s effort to ban birthright citizenship. In that case, the majority sharply limited the power of district court judges to block presidential orders, even if they are patently unconstitutional.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the principal dissent for the court’s three-member liberal wing, including Justices Jackson and Elena Kagan.

Justice Jackson added her own dissent, speaking only for herself. She said the majority imperiled the rule of law, creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”

That prompted an extended response from Justice Barrett, the next most junior justice and the author of the majority opinion. It did not stint on condescension.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion signed by all five of the other Republican appointees.

“The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain,” Justice Barrett went on, referring to Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”

Just months ago, Justice Barrett was the target of ugly criticism from the right for minor deviations from Mr. Trump’s legal agenda, with some of his allies calling her “a D.E.I. hire,” suggesting she had been chosen only for her gender. But the president’s supporters were delighted by her criticism of Justice Jackson, with some crowing that their earlier attacks on Justice Barrett had succeeded.

“Sometimes feeling the heat helps people see the light,” Mike Davis, a right-wing legal activist with close ties to the Trump administration, told NBC News.

Professor Murray said she suspected that Justice Barrett’s remarks were part of a larger agenda intended to silence a critic. “It was incredibly dismissive,” she said. “And I just wonder if it wasn’t just about this case, but rather about these asides that Justice Jackson has been leavening into her dissents.”

Justice Jackson was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., fulfilling a campaign promise to name the first Black woman to the court. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, she served as a law clerk to Justice Stephen G. Breyer and succeeded him.

Mr. Biden also appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she served for a year. The bulk of Justice Jackson’s judicial experience came in her eight years as a federal trial judge in Washington. Among her notable decisions there were ones blocking the first Trump administration’s attempts to fast-track deportations, to cut short grants for teen pregnancy prevention and to shield a former White House counsel from testifying before Congress.

Justice Jackson adjusted quickly to the Supreme Court. Other justices have said it took them years to get the hang of things.

“I was frightened to death for the first three years,” Justice Breyer said in a 2006 interview. Even Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a giant of the law who sat on the court from 1916 to 1939, needed time to find his footing. “So extraordinary an intellect as Brandeis said it took him four or five years to feel that he understood the jurisprudential problems of the court,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote of his friend and mentor.

Justice Jackson has appeared comfortable expressing herself from the start.

She has been particularly active in filing concurring opinions — ones that agree with the majority’s bottom line but offer additional comments or different reasoning.

Indeed, she has issued such opinions at the highest rate of any member of the court since at least 1937, according to data compiled and analyzed by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

She has also been active in dissent. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. did not write his first solo dissent in an argued case until 16 years into his tenure. Justice Jackson issued three such dissents in her first term.

Marin Levy, a law professor at Duke, said Justice Jackson had been doing two things in her dissents.

“The first category concerns standard disagreements on the merits,” Professor Levy said. “The second category feels quite different — I think here we see dissents in which Justice Jackson is trying to raise the alarm. Whether she is writing for the public or a future court, she is making a larger point about what she sees as not just the errors of the majority’s position but the dangers of it as well.”

Justice Jackson, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also been a harsh critic of the court’s use of truncated procedures in ruling on emergency applications.

“This fly-by-night approach to the work of the Supreme Court is not only misguided,” she wrote in April, when the court said that Venezuelan men the administration was seeking to deport to El Salvador had sued in the wrong court. “It is also dangerous.”

In a dissent from an emergency ruling in June granting Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive Social Security data, Justice Jackson accused the majority of giving Mr. Trump favored treatment. “What would be an extraordinary request for everyone else,” she wrote, “is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this administration.”

When the court let Mr. Trump lift humanitarian parole protections for more than 500,000 migrants in May, Justice Jackson wrote that the majority had “plainly botched” the analysis, “rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation.”

Justices Jackson and Sotomayor are the only members of the court who have served as trial judges. In the last term, Justice Jackson repeatedly criticized the majority for undermining the authority of their colleagues on the front lines.

In the dissent that prompted Justice Barrett’s rebuke, she decried the majority’s “dismissive treatment of the solemn duties and responsibilities of the lower courts.”

Last year, in a dissent in a public corruption case, Justice Jackson seemed to allude to revelations by ProPublica and others that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. had failed to disclose luxury travel provided to them by billionaire benefactors, a strikingly critical swipe on a sensitive topic.

“Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions,” she wrote. “Greed makes governments — at every level — less responsive, less efficient and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/us/s ... f11dfcd63a

[ponchi101]

technically speaking, when a court of nine judges hears a case, there should be a logical path that would lead to a consensus of opinions.
When a court then splits their opinions, it means that no logical process is used to determine those opinions.
Lawyers are trained to win arguments. Not to find the truth.

[dryrunguy]

Supreme Court Clears Way for Mass Firings at Federal Agencies
The Trump administration had asked the justices to block a lower court’s ruling that paused the largest phase of the president’s efforts to downsize the government.

Paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/us/p ... f11dfcd63a

[ti-amie]

technically speaking, when a court of nine judges hears a case, there should be a logical path that would lead to a consensus of opinions.
When a court then splits their opinions, it means that no logical process is used to determine those opinions.
Lawyers are trained to win arguments. Not to find the truth.

Supreme Court justices are also supposed to review settled law and apply it to the case before them. It's not supposed to be about ideology or personal beliefs.

[dryrunguy]

technically speaking, when a court of nine judges hears a case, there should be a logical path that would lead to a consensus of opinions.
When a court then splits their opinions, it means that no logical process is used to determine those opinions.
Lawyers are trained to win arguments. Not to find the truth.

Supreme Court justices are also supposed to review settled law and apply it to the case before them. It's not supposed to be about ideology or personal beliefs.

But here's the thing... There isn't a single, universally accepted interpretation of each piece of constitutional law. It is inevitably open to interpretation, and interpretation is inevitably guided by ideology or personal belief. And that harsh reality makes its way into every vote cast on the Supreme Court. It's true if you're Barrett. It's true if you're Jackson. It's true for all of them.

Back when we had a liberal-leaning Supreme Court, did they not generally rule based on constitutional interpretation through a lens of ideology or personal belief? Of course they did. And if they did differently, if there was some more strict adherence to constitutionality over personal belief, it was before my lifetime.

The bottom line is 5-6 of our current Supreme Court justices are firmly in the grip of the executive branch at any given time. That will not change any time soon. Balance of powers is a dead construct. The best Jackson and the rest of us who tend to agree with her (based on ideology and personal beliefs) can hope for is to regain the legislative branch of the U.S. government in 2 years (not going to happen) and the executive branch of the U.S. government in 4 years (almost certainly not going to happen).

Simply put, we're cooked. Today's decisions blessing mass firings of federal workers at the sole whim of the executive branch sealed the deal. (As if it wasn't clear enough when their ruling about birthright citizenship was handed down. If there was ever a crystal clear, unvague precept of constitutional law, it was birthright citizenship. The framers of the U.S. Constitution couldn't have been any clearer than they were. And look where we are...)