Attention to the Unseen

Peter M. Shane writes: No one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior…

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The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system. Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent are snubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to…

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Cristian Farias writes: In April, U.S. District Judge William Young, who sits in Boston, made a procedural ruling from the bench that seemed to catch the lawyers in the courtroom by surprise. Like many other judges these days, Young had convened a hearing to consider whether to grant a preliminary injunction—which, in the normal course, would put a quick stop to an illegal or otherwise unconstitutional government policy. By one count, in the first seventy days of Donald Trump’s presidency,…

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Chris Feliciano Arnold writes: Because I was naturalized as a child, I didn’t have to take the famous civics test—I was still learning that stuff in school. I just rolled my fingertips in wet ink and held still for a three-quarter-profile photograph that revealed my nose shape, ear placement, jawline, and forehead contour. My parents sat beside me for an interview with an immigration officer who asked me my name, where I lived, and who took care of me. But…

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