The children’s mobile immunization clinic, operated by Adventist Health and funded by First 5 Kern, has been around for decades — and on Wednesday morning, the medical team aboard was already busy with walk-in traffic in the parking lot of…Read more

The majority of Bakersfield’s Measure N sales tax dollars continue to be dedicated to personnel as costs across the board continue to rise.Read more

Three men were arrested in eastern Kern County Wednesday on suspicion of cargo theft, conspiracy and possession of a stolen vehicle, the Kern County Sheriff’s Office reported.Read more

California’s largest association of local food banks called Wednesday for restoring state spending on a key safety net that serves poor people who will soon be disqualified from receiving federal nutrition assistance.Read more

Clear Statements is a recurring series by Abbe R. Gluck on civil litigation and the modern regulatory and statutory state. Rumors of the textualist triumph over legislative history have been greatly exaggerated. A debate has raged among lawyers and judges for decades about the changes the Supreme Court’s textualists have wrought in statutory interpretation. One of textualism’s key moves has been to argue that congressional intent is inscrutable in a 535-member body and so congressional materials – especially legislative history, such as floor statements and committee reports from the enactment process – should not be considered, instead of an approach focused only on the words actually enacted. Critics have responded that interpreting statutory text divorced from the purpose or history of a statute’s enactment actually enlarges, not cabins, judicial discretion and does not give sufficient respect to Congress’ collective intentions or work-product. But recent cases suggest the pendulum may be secretly swinging back. Whether the justices want to admit it or not, the court today is paying attention to legislative history and what it reveals about statutory purposes. And the “secretly” is the most intriguing part. My phone was ablaze about two weeks ago with reports from a Federalist Society panel at the University of Pennsylvania examining Justice Samuel Alito’s statutory interpretation jurisprudence. Even though Alito is a self-proclaimed textualist, he has never fully eschewed legislative history. He looked to legislative history often when he was on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit and remains the most explicit user of congressional materials among the court’s most committed textualists. Indeed, one of his best known dissents, his 2020 opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court considered whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applies to sexual-orientation discrimination, chastised his fellow textualists for “ignor[ing] … congressional intent and legislative history.” The discussion of Alito’s approach, however, opened the door to a much more interesting revelation. One panelist, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, himself a textualist, not only stated that it can be helpful when construing a statute to understand the circumstances that gave rise to it – in other words the statute’s general purpose, although the “p” word was never uttered – but he also noted that legislative history can be very helpful to understanding those circumstances. But next came the kicker: Katsas referred to a recent dissent he authored concerning the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He admitted that he himself wanted to reference the circumstances that gave rise to one of the governing statutes, a financial corruption law that came out of the Enron scandal but was being used to prosecute the assailants. Rather than cite the act’s legislative history directly, however, Katsas explained that he chose instead to cite a Supreme Court case, which itself announced the act’s purpose only after consulting its legislative history. Specifically, Katsas stated that, although “most of the briefs and stuff cited the legislative history,” he decided not to do so “because I didn’t want to create a side show of, you know, conservative Fed Soc judge in this edgy case cites legislative history.” So instead he cited a page in Yates v United States – an opinion written by liberal purposivist Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which itself relies directly on the act’s legislative history to discern its purpose. After telling this story, Katsas jokingly said that he “got away with it.” One of Katsas’ co-panelists joked back: “we were all fooled!” Indeed, when the same case, Fischer v. United States, eventually reached the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred specifically to object to the majority’s failure to look to legislative purpose. She cited both Yates and, then expressly, the legislative history that case relied on and that Katsas had admittedly laundered in. There are a lot of things to say about the panel on Alito, including what seemed to be some general acceptance of his more open approach to legislative history. That in and of itself shows a moderating trend with respect to that tool, even by conservative textualists. Former Judge Richard Posner and I demonstrated previously that many federal appellate judges long viewed exclusionary approaches to legislative history such as Justice Antonin Scalia’s as too extreme, and find limited use of legislative history appropriate. Some textualist judges have recently started advocating for a new “contextualism” – a theory that emphasizes more inputs, sometimes including purposes and consequences as well as the text. It remains to be seen whether explicit legislative history references will increase as that approach develops. But what about the laundering? The reluctance to say that consulting statutory purpose is helpful and citing instead an old precedent that itself cites legislative history – that’s the really interesting part. It is also something that I’ve been tracking for some time. As it turns out, Katsas is far from alone. Indeed, most of the current textualist justices themselves routinely launder legislative history through precedent. Court-watchers should care about this phenomenon for several reasons. First, as noted, lawyers briefing cases should know these materials still have sway. The court actually utilizes the concept of legislative purpose frequently, as my own research reveals, and legislative history, even if not explicitly cited in opinions, remains an important ingredient in the excavation of a statute’s goals and motivating circumstances. Second, if you are an administrative-law aficionado transitioning to a post-Chevron world, you are probably trying to get your arms around the court’s general statutory interpretation approach, since agency interpretations are now treated just like ordinary statutory interpretations. So, you need to understand that the textualist revolution, despite appearances, is not 100% complete. Consider a few examples. Quarles v. United States concerned the definition of burglary under the Armed Career Criminal Act. There, Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not cite directly to legislative history even as he discussed at some length Congress’ intentions in defining the crime. Instead, he quoted another case which expressly relied on legislative history for a statement of statutory purpose. According to Kavanaugh, “[a]s the Court recognized in Taylor, Congress ‘singled out burglary’ because of its ‘inherent potential for harm to persons.’” But Taylor relied extensively on legislative history, including hearing transcripts and committee reports, to conclude: “The legislative history also indicates that Congress singled out burglary … for inclusion as a predicate offense.” Or take the recent case of Wisconsin Bell, Inc. v. United States ex rel. Heath, where Justice Clarence Thomas concurred to discuss the scope of the False Claims Act and placed significant reliance on the purpose and goals of that act. He noted that “[w]e have said that the purpose of the FCA was ‘to provide for restitution to the government of money taken from it by fraud,’” citing United States ex rel. Marcus v. Hess, a 1943 case that itself relied on legislative history for its purposive conclusions, and also quoting United States v. McNinch for the proposition that “Congress enacted the FCA because it ‘wanted to stop th[e] plundering of the public treasury.’” McNinch, decided back in 1958, relied on testimony before Congress, citing the House and Senate reports, and concluded that “the language of that Act, read as a whole in the light of normal usage, and the available legislative history . . . le[a]d[s] to the conclusion that an application for credit insurance does not fairly come within the scope that Congress intended the Act to have.” There are numerous additional examples. Just one more will suffice. In ZF Automotive US, Inc. v. Luxshare, a case involving the construction of a discovery statute, Justice Amy Coney Barrett relied on a 2004 opinion authored by Justice Ginsburg, Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., to describe the effect of an earlier amendment to the provision under consideration. She wrote: “As we have previously observed, that shift created ‘the possibility of U. S. judicial assistance in connection with administrative and quasi-judicial proceedings abroad.” The quote from Ginsburg’s Intel opinion was a direct quote from a Senate report. But that Senate report wasn’t cited in Barrett’s opinion. Ultimately, their laundering of legislative history reveals that the court’s modern textualists are still caught in in some methodological cross hairs. I have previously written on SCOTUSblog about various other ways in which the court’s textualists are now split over the tools they employ to interpret statutes. An earlier post concerned divides over certain policy presumptions, known as canons of interpretation. But legislative history has an even longer pedigree and a recent history of coming under more aggressive attack. In other words, today’s justices are grappling with what it means to be a textualist court. As part of that examination, some justices, including the justices already discussed in this post, have claimed at times to care more about “ordinary meaning” than how Congress understands the statutes it enacts. Barrett has argued most emphatically against any approach that favors the congressional perspective. This is despite the fact that Congress has been the traditional referent in statutory interpretation cases for more than a century – judges, as Barrett herself has acknowledged, have claimed since the dawn of the statutory era that their duty is to interpret statutes as “faithful agent[s] to the legislature.” So this shift away from Congress, which I have detailed elsewhere, is a big deal. But the secretive use of legislative history tells a different story. It reveals that the current court is trying to look away from Congress with one eye but can’t help looking back at it with another. Even ordinary-meaning textualists at least recognize in the dark that Congress – and the purposes and history behind statutes – are important to a legitimate interpretation. Deeper discussion of the ordinary meaning approach must await a different post. (Although let’s face it, it’s a fiction: ordinary people do not read federal statutes, and federal statutes are not narrative documents that are easily understandable even if someone tried to pick them up. An ordinary-meaning approach thus ultimately may give more power to judges to decide meaning for themselves.) But the continued, albeit subtle, reliance on legislative history and congressional purposes reveals a court which understands, on some level, that statutory interpretation without reference to Congress just doesn’t make much sense. Thank you, Judge Katsas, for cracking the door open just little bit. The post Legislative history lives on – in secret appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Read more

Courtly Observations is a recurring series by Erwin Chemerinsky that focuses on what the Supreme Court’s decisions will mean for the law, for lawyers and lower courts, and for people’s lives. The Supreme Court’s decision in Chiles v. Salazar, essentially declaring unconstitutional the Colorado law prohibiting talk therapy to attempt to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity, continues a pattern of inconsistent decisions concerning the ability of the government to regulate speech by professionals. Although it is an 8-1 decision, if followed, it could put in danger the countless ways in which the government regulates this form of speech. The history of professional speech in the court Chiles v. Salazar is not the first time the Supreme Court has had to deal with a First Amendment challenge to laws that regulate speech by professionals in advising clients and patients. What is striking about the decisions is their inconsistency. Compare, for example, the court’s decisions in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey and 2018’s National Institute for Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra. In Casey, the court upheld a law that required doctors to provide information to a woman deciding whether to proceed with an abortion. The Pennsylvania law compelled the doctor to tell the woman about the nature of the abortion procedure, the health risks of abortion and of childbirth, the probable gestational age of the unborn child, and the availability of printed materials describing the fetus, medical assistance for childbirth, potential child support, and agencies that would provide adoption services or other alternatives to abortion. The court rejected a challenge that this was impermissible compelled speech and declared: “[w]e…see no reason why the State may not require doctors to inform a woman seeking an abortion of the availability of materials,” including those related to consequences of the pregnancy such as fetal development, “even when those consequences have no direct relation to her health.” Yet in NIFLA v. Becerra, the court declared unconstitutional a California law that required that reproductive health care facilities post a notice that women who economically qualify can receive free or low-cost contraceptives and abortions paid by the state. The law also required that unlicensed facilities post a notice that they were not licensed to provide medical care. The Supreme Court held that the law was compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his majority opinion, declared that “this Court has not recognized ‘professional speech’ as a separate category of speech.” The court made little effort to distinguish Casey. The cases are difficult to reconcile except that both came to conclusions favored by opponents of abortion rights. Or compare 1991’s Rust v. Sullivan with 2001’s Legal Services Corporation v. Velazquez. Rust involved a challenge to a federal regulation that prohibited recipients of federal funds for family-planning services from providing “counseling concerning the use of abortion as a method of family planning or provid[ing] referral for abortion as a method of family planning.” The regulations prohibited recipients of federal money from referring a pregnant woman to an abortion provider, even upon specific request. Also, the rules “broadly prohibit[ed] a [recipient of funds] . . . from engaging in activities that ‘encourage, promote, or advocate abortion as a method of family planning.’” This clearly involved a restriction on speech by doctors and health professionals. But Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the court, upheld the regulation on the ground that the government could decide what activity to subsidize. By contrast, in Legal Services Corporation v. Velazquez (which was not an abortion case), the court declared unconstitutional a federal law that prohibited attorneys receiving money from the federal Legal Services Corporation from bringing challenges to the legality of welfare laws and regulations. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the opinion for the court, explained: “Restricting LSC attorneys in advising their clients and in presenting arguments and analyses to the courts distorts the legal system by altering the traditional role of the attorneys.” I never have been able to reconcile Rust and Velazquez. Both involved the federal government putting conditions on how its money could be used for speech by professionals. Or compare the court’s two most recent cases dealing with state regulation of professionals. In last year’s United States v. Skrmetti, the court upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting gender affirming care for transgender youth and proclaimed the need to defer to the state legislature in making decisions with regard to medical treatment. But in Chiles v. Salazar, there is not a word about deference to the judgment of the Colorado legislature that conversion therapy is ineffective and dangerous. To be fair, Skrmetti was not a First Amendment case and the court did not use heightened scrutiny, but there still is a striking difference in the underlying question of whether there should be judicial deference to the judgment of a legislature when regulating professional care. Looking at these cases reveals a stark pattern that explains the differences among them: it is all about the court making a value choice about whether it likes the government regulation.  The future of government regulation of professional speech Besides being inconsistent with the court’s own precedent, the decision in Chiles v. Salazar also has some deeply troubling implications which the majority makes no attempt to address. Based on this decision, can the states effectively regulate any professional speech? For example, could a state adopt a law prohibiting therapists from advising patients to commit suicide?  Perhaps the easy answer is that such a law would meet strict scrutiny – that is, it would achieve a compelling government interest (to prevent people from committing suicide). But the court made no such findings in Chiles v. Salazar when faced with a form of medical care that evidence shows to be ineffective and harmful. Instead, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Chiles v. Salazar suggested that the medical malpractice is the way of dealing with harmful professional speech. The court, however, has held since 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan that civil liability for speech violates the First Amendment. Moreover, a state should be able to act in advance to prevent harm rather than waiting for the injury to lead to a tort suit. This was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s central point in dissent. She explained that “[s]peech uttered for purposes of providing medical treatment may be restricted incidentally when the State reasonably regulates the speaker’s provision of medical treatments to patients.” She concluded her opinion: “To do anything else opens a dangerous can of worms.  It threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect.  It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.” In response, supporters of the court’s ruling in Salazar may point to the fact that it was decided 8-1, with Justice Elena Kagan writing a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But Kagan urged what would be a significant change in First Amendment law. She began her opinion by stating: “I write only to note that if Colorado had instead enacted a content-based but viewpoint-neutral law, it would raise a different and more difficult question.” Under current law, a content-based restriction on speech must meet strict scrutiny.  A law can be found to be content-based in either of two ways: a subject matter-restriction or a viewpoint restriction. In many cases, the court has held that subject-matter restrictions – laws that regulate speech based on their topic – are content-based restrictions that must meet strict scrutiny. For example, in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, the court struck down a municipal ordinance that regulated the presence of outdoor signs, but that had 23 categories of exceptions. Under the ordinance, political signs could be quite large and remain up throughout the election season, while signs giving directions to events had to be small and could be posted for only a short time. The court unanimously declared this unconstitutional. The court said that “[o]n its face, the Sign Code is a content-based regulation of speech. We thus have no need to consider the government’s justifications or purposes for enacting the Code to determine whether it is subject to strict scrutiny.” The law in Reed was a subject-matter restriction on speech – favoring political expression over other topics – but nonetheless received strict scrutiny. Kagan’s approach would provide that only viewpoint restrictions, not subject-matter restrictions, must meet strict scrutiny. That would substantially lessen the Constitution’s protection for speech.  Moreover, Kagan’s objection to the Colorado law as being viewpoint-based still misses the crucial issue: Does Colorado have a sufficient interest in protecting gay, lesbian, and transgender youth from being subjected to treatment that is ineffective and harmful? It is notable that only Jackson in her dissent discusses the medical evidence supporting the Colorado law. Conclusion If the court follows its approach in Chiles v. Salazar, it will make it more difficult to regulate professionals and to hold them liable to protect their patients and clients. But there also is a strong sense that, at least for some of the justices, the case is less about a principle, but, like other professional speech cases, much more about the court’s feelings about this law. In the last year, in a number of cases, the conservative majority on the court has refused to provide constitutional protection for gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals. Chiles v. Salazar is the court keeping the legislatures – in Colorado and 25 other states – from doing so as well. The post Conversion therapy and professional speech appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Read more

Curious about how Supreme Court justices spend their spare time? Justice Sonia Sotomayor revealed on Tuesday that she likes reading … recent books from her colleagues. She “said she just finished reading Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s memoir and is in the middle of reading former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s.” At the Court On Monday, the court was asked on its interim relief docket to bar Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and the Franklin County Board of Elections from removing Sam Ronan, a candidate for Congress in the state’s 15th district, from Ohio’s Republican primary election ballot. LaRose and county election officials responded to that request yesterday. For more on the dispute, see the On Site section below. The court will next hear arguments on Monday, April 20, the first day of its April sitting. Morning Reads Sotomayor Faults Kavanaugh Over Immigration Stops Concurrence Jordan Fischer, Bloomberg Law During a Tuesday appearance in Lawrence, Kansas, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized Justice Brett Kavanaugh, without naming him, “for failing to grasp the real-world effects of an unsigned order last year that allowed immigration enforcement sweeps in Los Angeles to resume,” according to Bloomberg Law. “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops,” Sotomayor said, referencing Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Noem v. Perdomo. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” In his concurrence, Kavanaugh wrote “that legal residents’ encounters with immigration agents are ‘typically brief,’” failing to grasp, according to Sotomayor, that even short detentions can have major “financial consequences” for hourly workers. U.S. Supreme Court justice warns of majority’s misuse of ‘shadow docket’ during Kansas talk Anna Kaminski, Kansas Reflector During that same event in Kansas, Sotomayor also reflected on the controversy surrounding the court’s “shadow docket,” and, specifically, the court’s multiple rulings on that docket in favor of the Trump administration. “There’s a lot of controversy over this process,” Sotomayor said, “because there’s a belief among some on my court – the majority – that whenever we stop the executive branch from doing something it wants to do, that’s irreparable harm to the government.” She continued, “There are others, like me, who believe that irreparable harm can happen to the people who are being affected.” How often does the Supreme Court overturn its own decisions? Mia Hennen, Pew Research Center As the Supreme Court weighs “whether to overrule two of its own long-standing legal precedents – one about presidential power over federal agencies, which has been in place for over 90 years, and another about campaign financing by political parties,” Pew Research Center investigated how often the court actually overturns its own decisions. Using data from the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court Database at Pennsylvania State University, Pew found that, “[s]ince the Supreme Court’s founding in 1789 through its most recent full term in 2024, fewer than 1% of all rulings (236 of 29,202) have overturned an earlier high court decision.” “Overturning precedent hasn’t been very common in recent decades, either. Between the 2005 and 2024 terms, only 21 of 1,471 rulings (1.4%) overturned one or more earlier decisions.” Plea deal reached for man charged with threatening to torture Supreme Court justices Zach Schonfeld, The Hill Panos Anastasiou, 77, “[a]n Alaska man charged with threatening to torture and assassinate six Supreme Court justices and some of their family members,” filed a notice on Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska that he has reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors, according to The Hill. Anastasiou has been accused “of submitting hundreds of messages to the Supreme Court online, many of which allegedly contained violent threats. Some were purportedly sent following the high court’s decision that then-former President Trump was entitled to broad criminal immunity.” Tuesday’s filing did not reveal the “details of the terms of his agreement with the government.” Machine gun ban contested at 11th Circuit Alex Pickett, Courthouse News Service On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit considered a Florida man’s effort to overturn his conviction for possessing a machine gun. The man contends that “he merely had a [machine gun] conversion device attached to an otherwise legal Glock handgun,” according to Courthouse News Service. “Assistant U.S. Attorney Justin Silverberg, representing the federal government, argued the appellate court only needs to look at the landmark 2008 Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which found a ban on the possession of handguns unconstitutional but allowed for the prohibition of ‘dangerous and unusual’ firearms,” contending that the Florida man’s gun fits that category. On Site Interim Docket State election dispute on political speech comes to Supreme Court on interim docket Lawyers for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, as well as county election officials, urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday to let them go ahead with a ballot that does not include Sam Ronan, a candidate for Ohio’s 15th congressional district, for the state’s Republican primary on May 5. From the SCOTUSblog Team A Supreme Court status report In early January, as the country eagerly awaited a tariffs ruling that – as it turned out – was still more than a month away, Supreme Court watchers raised concerns about the court’s pace for releasing opinions. Approximately three months later, are those concerns still justified? Contributor Corner Supreme Court summarily closes the courthouse doors again In his Civil Rights and Wrongs column, Daniel Harawa reflected once more on “the Supreme Court’s troubling habit of summarily closing the courthouse doors on those with the least power in our legal system,” this time highlighting a qualified immunity ruling. Podcasts Amarica’s Constitution New World, Same Constitution Akhil Amar and Andy Lipka, who attended last week’s argument in the birthright citizenship case, share their initial reactions and then analyze what was said by the justices and advocates. A Closer Look: Johnson v. United States Just over 13 years ago, the Supreme Court considered the use of a drug-detection dog on a front porch in Florida v. Jardines, holding that a porch should be considered “part of the home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes” and that, therefore, officers should have secured a warrant before bringing the dog to the scene. At their next private conference, the justices will consider a petition for review that applies that 2013 ruling to a multi-unit apartment building, contending that the area immediately outside an apartment door should be treated like a porch under the Fourth Amendment. The case, Johnson v. United States, originated in 2019, when a Narcotics Task Force in Washington County, Maryland, brought a drug-detection dog to Apartment 201 at an apartment complex called Greenwich Place. The man who lived in that apartment, Eric Tyrell Johnson, was believed to be involved in a drug trafficking operation, and police officers were working “to confirm – or dispel – those suspicions before seeking a search warrant for” his apartment. With the permission of building management, police officers brought the drug-detection dog to the area immediately outside Johnson’s apartment, which “was recessed from the common hallway by approximately three and a half feet.” The dog “alerted to the odor of illegal drugs in the area of the lower door seam,” and the police cited this alert in their successful application for a warrant to search Johnson’s home. “The search uncovered a heroin-fentanyl powder mixture, a handgun, ammunition, cell phones, cash, and other items indicative of drug-dealing.” In the resulting trial, Johnson attempted to have this evidence suppressed “as fruit of a Fourth Amendment violation.” He argued that the warrantless dog sniff was out of line with two past Supreme Court rulings: the front porch case noted above and Kyllo v. United States, in which the court held that police cannot use specialized investigative tools like thermal-imaging devices to scan the inside of a home without a warrant. The district court, however, denied Johnson’s motion to suppress, and “Johnson was convicted of drug- and gun-related offenses.” In August 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision, holding that “dog sniffs are different” than thermal-imaging devices because they point to the presence of illegal drugs in a home without “expos[ing] noncontraband items that otherwise would remain hidden from public view.” And the area outside of an apartment door is different than a front porch, the 4th Circuit continued, because it’s “part of a common hallway, used regularly by other building residents and by building cleaning staff.” In his petition to the Supreme Court, Johnson emphasized that the 4th Circuit’s ruling deepened a split between lower courts over whether using a drug-detection dog at the door of an apartment is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. Decisions like the 4th Circuit’s are “wrongheaded” and “threaten[] to deprive Americans who live in multi-unit dwellings, or in homes that abut a stress, of their Fourth Amendment rights just because they don’t live in detached houses,” Johnson wrote, noting that “approximately a quarter of all Americans live in multi-unit dwellings.” In its response brief, the federal government asked the court to leave the 4th Circuit’s ruling against Johnson in place, contending that it correctly held that the Supreme Court’s past rulings on dog sniffs and the Fourth Amendment did not establish that the sniffing outside of his apartment door required a warrant. In analyzing whether the area outside an apartment door is comparable to a front porch, lower courts consider case-specific details, such as who has access to the space, wrote U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer. What mattered in Johnson’s case, Sauer continued, wasn’t that he lived in an apartment rather than a house, but that his apartment door entered onto a busy hallway “serving numerous units” that “was frequented by other tenants, non-resident visitors, and the building’s cleaning staff.” Given this, the dog sniffs did “not infringe any legitimate privacy interest” protected by the Fourth Amendment. Johnson v. United States is scheduled to be considered by the justices for the first time at their private conference on Friday, April 17. SCOTUS Quote CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “Well, what if you stopped them on the street and said is a fish [a] record document or tangible object?” MR. MARTINEZ: “I think if you – if you asked them that question and you – you pointed them to the fact that –” JUSTICE SCALIA: “I don’t think you would get a polite answer to either of those questions.” — Yates v. United States  (2014) The post SCOTUStoday: Sotomayor criticizes Kavanaugh appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Read more