Despite adjustments, court harried in June

Updated 40m ago
By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court justices front-loaded their calendar this term, holding more oral arguments in the fall and winter and fewer in the spring, hoping to ease the traditional June crunch.

Yet as some of the justices, including John Paul Stevens, have lamented, they entered June — the usual culmination of their nine-month term — a bit behind schedule. So the June frenzy and what retired Justice David Souter recently called "the quickened pace of decisions" endure.

The justices issued five decisions Tuesday and will continue with a new batch today.

SUPREME COURT: Track cases and read more about each justice

Among the remaining 27 cases of the 78 heard are disputes testing individuals' guns rights, the validity of a federal anti-fraud law and whether people who sign petitions for ballot measures can stay anonymous.

"I miss the adrenaline rush of the end of the term," said Washington lawyer Kannon Shanmugam, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia. "This is when the justices and clerks work at full speed and the closest and hardest cases typically come."

"It's a nightmare," Deborah Pearlstein, a former Stevens law clerk who is a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School, said of the caseload the justices face in June.

The court is in a transition period, too, and the justices are finding new bearings among each other. Justice Sonia Sotomayor succeeded Souter last summer.

Any new appointment, Chief Justice John Roberts told C-SPAN shortly after Sotomayor was nominated, is "to some extent … unsettling."

The term was marked by another rarity. The justices held arguments on a major campaign-finance case a month before their customary start on the first Monday in October.

In January, they issued their 5-4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, lifting government regulations on corporate and labor union spending in elections. That decision, which President Obama criticized in his State of the Union address a few days later and which continues to reverberate politically, may mark the dramatic highpoint of the term.

Yet several other pending cases will also define the evolving Roberts Court.

When decisions are handed down in the last days of this month, it will be the last time the voice of Justice Stevens, retiring after nearly 35 years, is heard from the bench. (Obama has nominated U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace him.)

Stanford University law Professor Jeffrey Fisher asked Stevens at a conference in May how he might feel on the first Monday in October, when his colleagues begin a term without him.

"I really don't know," Stevens said. "I'm mainly concerned about getting the work done by the end of the term. We're a little behind in some of our output."

Among the cases awaiting decisions:

•McDonald v. City of Chicago: testing whether the Second Amendment right to bear arms can be invoked against city and state gun regulations; a 2008 ruling said the Second Amendment could be used to challenge regulations by the federal enclave of Washington.

•Black v. United States; Skilling v. United States; Weyhrauch v. United States: testing the constitutionality of a commonly used federal anti-fraud law that makes it a crime to deprive shareholders or the public of "the intangible right of honest services."

•Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project; Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder: testing a provision of the 2001 Patriot Act prohibiting "material support" to a designated terrorist group, even when it might involve advice on non-terrorist, humanitarian activities.

•John Doe No. 1 v. Reed: testing whether people who signed a petition for a state referendum against gay legal rights have a First Amendment claim to keep their names private.

•Christian Legal Society of University of California, Hastings, College of Law v. Martinez: regarding an appeal by a student group denied recognition at a state school because it excluded gay students.

•City of Ontario v. Quon: testing whether a police department's review of text messages sent by a SWAT team officer on a department pager, some to his wife and some to a mistress, violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington ... ndar_N.htm