In a year when the U.S. Supreme Court heard six(!) cases where Washington Legal Foundation supported grants of certiorari with amicus curiae briefs (leading all non-profit groups “by quite a large margin,” according to EmpiricalSCOTUS.com), it seems a bit churlish to pick on the Court for rejecting a number of important cases. Then again, the entire point of this feature is to identify such oversights. Even though the Court granted some 43 percent of the cases in which WLF supported cert, it still overlooked a host of worthwhile appeals, once again taking on an exceedingly light docket.
Does the American Law Institute Have an Ethics Problem on Its Hands?
*Michelle Stilwell, the Mary G. Waterman Fellow at WLF, significantly contributed to this post.
This Monday the U.S. Supreme Court will conduct its Long Conference, so named for the larger than usual number of certiorari petitions it considers there. With the fate of so many cert petitions hanging in the balance—and the overwhelming majority of them about to be denied—now is an opportune time to look back at the top 10 cases that were wrongly denied cert in the Court’s last term.
Fracking is alive and well in Colorado. This past Monday, the Colorado Supreme Court delivered a unanimous and resounding victory to property-rights owners in two important hydrofracking cases. Joining states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Ohio, the Centennial State determined that local activism must give way to state law when it comes to permitting the fracking of oil and gas wells.
Deferred-prosecution agreements (DPAs) pose thorny questions from an overcriminalization perspective. But DPA skeptics should welcome—at least for now—a decision issued last Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. In a case entitled United States v. Fokker Services B.V., the DC Circuit held that federal district courts may not second-guess the charging decisions of prosecutors under the guise of performing their Speedy Trial Act (STA) duties.
Ed. Note: This morning at a press conference (the video on-demand for which can be accessed here), Washington Legal Foundation released the third edition of its Timeline: Federal Erosion of Business Civil Liberties. Joining the author of this post, WLF General Counsel Mark Chenoweth, at the briefing were former Associate Attorney General of the U.S. Jay Stephens and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Executive Director Norman Reimer. Over the next six days, the WLF Legal Pulse will be featuring commentary by leading white-collar criminal law voices on each of the six topics covered in the Timeline.