Kern County energy projects whose subsidies the Trump administration canceled last year may be revived by a list of roughly 2,000 Biden-era projects the U.S. Department of Energy has told Congress are worthy of retention or modification.Read more

The Fairfax School District agreed Monday to pay $5 million to an anonymous victim of sexual abuse by a teacher more than a decade ago.Read more

A Fresno lender pleaded guilty Monday in separate federal cases in which he and a partner were accused of defrauding investors in Bitwise Industries, the workforce development venture that made a big splash in Bakersfield before collapsing in 2023.Read more

More than 2,000 volunteers in myriad crews tackled the responsibility of spiffing up Bakersfield on Saturday at the 23rd annual Great American Cleanup. Volunteers swept up litter, took care of community gardens and supported beautification projects. Led by Keep Bakersfield…Read more

The justices on Monday considered the proper relationship between state and federal courts and wrestled with confusion surrounding a doctrine addressing that relationship as they heard oral argument in T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System. The dispute began approximately three years ago, when a Maryland woman, identified only as T.M., was involuntarily admitted to Baltimore Washington Medical Center after experiencing a psychotic episode. Over the next three months, T.M. and her family filed several state and federal lawsuits against the hospital, challenging doctors’ treatment plan and seeking to secure her release. Most relevant to the Supreme Court case is the petition she filed in Maryland state court in May 2023, in which she alleged that her involuntary commitment was unlawful. While that petition was pending, T.M., her family, hospital staff, and attorneys negotiated a settlement agreement that outlined conditions under which T.M. could be released, including that she would continue taking medicine prescribed by the hospital and begin seeing a new psychiatrist. In June 2023, the state judge assigned to T.M.’s case entered this agreement as a consent order, and T.M. was released from the hospital. Once home, T.M. filed a new federal lawsuit against Baltimore Washington Medical Center, the University of Maryland Medical System, and leaders of those institutions over the consent order, alleging that she had agreed to it under duress and that it “violates the Maryland Declaration of Rights and the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and is therefore unconstitutional, unenforceable, and void.” T.M. also appealed the order to Maryland’s intermediate appellate court. On Monday, the Supreme Court considered whether T.M.’s federal lawsuit can proceed or if – as a federal district court in Maryland and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit held – lower federal courts do not have the authority to review it under a legal principle known as the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. That doctrine bars lower federal courts from hearing “cases brought by state-court losers complaining of injuries caused by state-court judgments rendered before the district court proceedings commenced and inviting district court review and rejection of those judgments,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summarized in a 2005 case called Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp. The specific question before the justices on Monday was whether the Rooker-Feldman doctrine applies when the state-court judgment at issue – here, the consent order – remains subject to further review in state courts. Lisa Blatt, who argued on behalf of the hospital and health system, asserted that a ruling for her clients would not undo the court’s effort to narrow the application of the Rooker-Feldman doctrine in Exxon. In Exxon, the court held that “Rooker-Feldman almost may never apply,” Blatt said, but that doesn’t mean it never applies, and “it happens to apply” to T.M.’s case. Blatt emphasized that Congress explicitly said it “wanted no federal review of state court judgments until the state’s highest court has had the opportunity to correct any errors” in the federal statute that provides a basis for the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. She contended that allowing lower federal courts to review a judgment that’s still under review in the state courts would “damage[] the integrity of the state appellate process.” Elizabeth Prelogar, who argued on behalf of T.M., offered a different take on that federal statute, which provides that “[f]inal judgments or decrees rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had, may be reviewed by the Supreme Court.” Prelogar contended that this addresses the Supreme Court’s ability to review state-court judgments, not the work of all federal courts. “Section 1257 says nothing at all about district court jurisdiction when there’s no final judgment of a state high court,” she said. Although several justices noted that lower courts struggle to apply the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, they questioned whether embracing T.M.’s vision of the doctrine would actually do anything to clear things up. For example, Justice Samuel Alito said that he doesn’t “really see a rational basis for drawing a distinction between a case where the state court proceeding has concluded and a case where the state court proceeding is ongoing.” And Justice Elena Kagan observed that “[t]here are a lot of things that have confounded the lower courts on Rooker-Feldman, but I’m not sure that this question necessarily is one of them.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh pressed Prelogar on the “value,” as Sotomayor put it, of “having a federal district court and a state appellate court simultaneously reviewing a state court judgment.” Prelogar responded that “there is a significant value in ensuring that federal courts are available to vindicate federal rights, including when state court judgments themselves give rise to that kind of constitutional violation.” Whether to overrule the Rooker-Feldman doctrine altogether was not a question presented in the case, but multiple justices nonetheless brought up that possibility during Monday’s debate. Prelogar emphasized that the court does not need to overrule the doctrine in order to side with T.M., but she also described it as “egregiously wrong” and “out of sync with modern precedent about how the Court articulates jurisdictional rules.” She noted that overruling Roe v. Wade was not a question presented in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 case in which the court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. “So the Court has sometimes, when it’s delved into a doctrine, decided that it makes sense to reconsider precedent,” Prelogar said. For her part, Blatt asserted that “[t]his is not Dobbs” and “[t]his is not Roe v. Wade,” and she urged the court not to overrule the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. Indeed, Blatt went so far as to proclaim that the justices are “not going to overrule Rooker” but then apologized and adjusted her statement to “I don’t think you’re doing to do that” “in an April case.” Several of those present at the argument laughed long and hard at Blatt’s comments before Alito responded, “Don’t dare my colleagues.” The court’s ruling is expected by early July. The post Justices debate the relationship between state and federal courts appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Read more

The Supreme Court on Monday morning agreed to take up the case of a Catholic preschool challenging its exclusion from a Colorado “universal preschool” program. The justices also agreed to review a Texas man’s challenge to his sentence for possession of a gun, although they declined to weigh in on the constitutionality of the conviction itself. The announcements came as part of a list of orders released on Monday from the justices’ private conference on Friday, April 17. *** In St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, the court granted a petition for review filed by a Catholic preschool in Littleton, Colorado, which argues that its exclusion from Colorado’s universal preschool program is a form of religious discrimination in violation of the First Amendment, because Colorado will not provide it with an exemption from rules that would require it to admit everyone – including LGBTQ children and children with LGBTQ parents. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit rejected the preschool’s argument. In its view, the state’s conditions were neutral and generally applied to every preschool, regardless of relgion – the kind of government actions, the Supreme Court held in 1990 in Employment Division v. Smith, that normally do not violate the Constitution. The preschool came to the Supreme Court last fall, asking the court to take up the case. Although the justices on Monday turned down the preschool’s request to reconsider Employment Division v. Smith, they will hear oral arguments in the case . The court also granted review in Beaird v. United States, in which Kendrick Beaird was convicted of being a felon in possession of a gun. Beaird challenged (among other things) the constitutionality of his conviction, arguing that it violated the Second Amendment, but the court agreed only to take up his challenge to an enhancement to his sentence based on his possession of a magazine classified under commentary to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines as a “large capacity magazine.” The justices on Monday agreed to decide whether a 1993 case on how courts should deal with commentary to the Sentencing Guidelines still governs. *** In District of Columbia v. R.W., the justices summarily reversed a ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals – Washington, D.C.’s highest court – that had thrown out the convictions of a teenaged driver, known in court papers as R.W., for (among other things) unauthorized use of a vehicle. R.W. was arrested in 2023 when a police officer, responding to a call to “check out a suspicious vehicle at a suspicious address,” saw two people running from a parked car. When the car then began to back up, with its rear door still open, the police officer blocked the car from going any further, got out of his own car, told the driver – R.W. – to put his hands in the air, and drew his gun. R.W. argued that the arresting officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop him, and he asked the trial court to exclude all of the evidence that the police acquired after he was told to put up his hands. The trial court rejected that request, and R.W. was adjudicated to be delinquent and sentenced to one year of probation. R.W. appealed the denial of his request to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which reversed. The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed with R.W. that the police officer did not have reasonable suspicion to stop him. It reasoned that the trial court should not have considered the radio call that the officer received, which dispatched him to investigate a “suspicious vehicle.” First, the court observed, the police officer did not know why the call was made or why the vehicle was considered suspicious. Second, the court continued, the radio call instructed the officer “to look only for a suspicious vehicle” – a direction that “was so broad as to be useless.” The D.C. Court of Appeals also held that the trial court should not have relied on the flight by the two other passengers as the police officer arrived on the scene. “Because here the only fact associating R.W. and the other two occupants of the vehicle at the time of the seizure was their altogether mundane presence in the same car,” the police officer could not reasonably infer that R.W. and those occupants “were associated in a suspicious manner.” The District of Columbia came to the Supreme Court in late August, asking the justices to weigh in. In a six-page, unsigned opinion, the court reversed. The key question, in the court’s view, was whether the officer “had a reasonable suspicion that R.W. was engaged in criminal wrongdoing” before he told R.W. to put his hands up. And for the court, the answer to that question was yes. Even if it weren’t enough that the officer had seen “every person in R.W.’s car respond strangely to an approaching police car,” the court wrote, R. W.’s conduct after that – backing up with the door open – “strongly suggested that he was (like them) engaged in unlawful conduct he wished to hide from police.” “Pretending that the most revealing aspect of the encounter did not happen is incompatible with the totality-of-the-circumstances approach required by our precedents,” the court concluded. Justice Sonia Sotomayor indicated, without more, that she would have denied the District’s petition. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s decision, in a three-page opinion. In her view, the court should not have intervened, much less done so without additional briefing and oral argument. The D.C. Court of Appeals, she suggested, had applied the right test; the Supreme Court was simply quibbling with how it had done so. “Even if I would have assigned more heft to a particular fact in my own first-instance assessment,” she concluded, “I would not word-smith a lower court in this fashion.” *** Additionally, the court declined to hear the case of Castro v. Guevara, arising from the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Sotomayor wrote a statement regarding the court’s denial of review in that case. Under the convention, children who are wrongfully removed from their “country of habitual residence” are generally returned to that country so that any custody disputes can move forward there. The convention carves out several exceptions, however, including when the parent seeking the child’s return does not file a petition with the court for more than a year after the child’s removal and the child is “well settled” in the new country. The case has its roots in efforts by Jose Leonardo Brito Guevara to have his then-3-year-old daughter returned from the United States, where her mother took her without his permission in November 2021, to Venezuela. Brito began those efforts soon after she left Venezuela, but his attempts to work through diplomatic channels moved slowly and ultimately proved fruitless, as did his endeavors to reach an agreement with the child’s mother, Samantha Estafania Francisco Castro. Brito then went to federal court in Texas to seek the child’s return under the Hague Convention. The case eventually moved to a different district court in Texas, which did not hold a trial until March 2024 – more than a year after Brito filed his petition for her return and nearly two-and-a-half years after the child’s abduction to the United States. The district court denied Brito’s request for the child’s return. Although Brito had provided enough evidence that the child had been wrongfully taken from Venezuela that she should normally be returned, the court ruled, she should stay in the United States because she was well settled there. A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that ruling. The majority concluded that it was “not persuaded that” the child had “formed such deep or enduring ties to her new environment that returning to her home in Venezuela would contravene her best interests.” Castro then came to the Supreme Court in December, asking the justices to decide whether the court of appeals had applied the correct standard of review – specifically, whether it properly reviewed the district court’s decision “de novo” – that is, starting from a clean slate – or whether it should have instead determined only whether the lower court was clearly wrong. After considering the case at four consecutive conferences, the court turned down Castro’s petition for review without comment. In a four-page statement, Sotomayor emphasized that the question at the center of the case “warrants this Court’s attention,” particularly because the 5th Circuit’s ruling “may be erroneous.” But, she said, this case might not be the right one to take up the issue because the child returned to Venezuela (following an order by the Supreme Court on its interim docket) in January. Given that, if the court were to grant review in this case, she observed, the determination of whether she is “well settled” in the United States “would look very different.” *** Finally, the court turned down a request to decide whether a Massachusetts school district violated a couple’s parental rights when it encouraged their child to socially transition over their objections and also hid that fact from them. The question came to the court in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 2022 by Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, who contended that the Ludlow School Committee followed a protocol that directed school staff to use a student’s preferred name and pronouns without notifying that student’s parents. In so doing, the couple argued, the school district violated their parental rights under the Constitution, including both their right to direct their child’s upbringing and education and their right to make medical and mental health decisions for their child. The lower courts rejected that argument, prompting the parents to come to the Supreme Court in July. They told the justices that the parental rights question is “urgent” and emphasized that “[m]ore than 1,000 public school districts have adopted secret transition policies, resulting in dozens of lawsuits and harming countless children.”  The school district countered that the protocol that the parents claim the school district followed “does not exist.” Instead, it said, the school staff simply tried to apply state law and regulations, along with guidance from the state department of education, to the child in this case. And even if the protocol did exist, it continued, the parents’ challenge is a narrow one, because they are not challenging the state law and regulations on which it would be based. After considering the case at 13 consecutive conferences, the justices turned the couple’s petition for review down without comment. The order came less than two months after the justices granted a similar request on their interim docket from California parents. The majority in that case explained that those parents were likely to prevail on their claim that California’s policies violate the parents’ right to freely exercise their religion and their right to “direct the upbringing and education of their children.” The post Supreme Court will hear religious liberty case on Catholic preschools and LGBTQ families appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Read more

Immigration Matters is a recurring series by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández that analyzes the court’s immigration docket, highlighting emerging legal questions about new policy and enforcement practices. The future of President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to limit access to birthright citizenship is now positioned for a final decision from the Supreme Court. Questioning from the justices, during approximately two hours of oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, suggests an icy reception for the Justice Department’s claim that the constitutional guarantee of citizenship turns on an innovative interpretation of the legal concept known as “domicile.” Without acceptance of that interpretation by the court, the Trump administration is unlikely to successfully defend the president’s directive. *** Trump’s executive order, which he issued on January 20, 2025, claims that the 14th Amendment grants U.S. citizenship to children born in the United States depending on the citizenship or immigration status of their parents. The amendment’s citizenship clause provides that a person becomes a citizen “of the United States and the state wherein they reside” if they are born in the United States and are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” To successfully defend the constitutionality of Trump’s order, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer will have to convince a majority of justices on three fronts. First, that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means a person is “domiciled” in the United States. Second, that domicile should be interpreted to require legal permission to live in the United States indefinitely as a permanent resident, the most privileged form of immigration status, rather than temporarily or altogether without the federal government’s permission. Third, that children born in the United States acquire citizenship at birth only if their mother was domiciled in the country at the time of the child’s birth. The text of the citizenship clause does not use the term domicile, but the Trump administration argues that it is implied. Sauer, who is the federal government’s lead attorney before the Supreme Court, argued that “reside,” which does appear in the citizenship clause (in terms of state citizenship), “means domicile in the Constitution.” For children to acquire U.S. citizenship at birth, the constitutional provision “presupposes domicile,” he told the justices. Though none of them openly embraced Sauer’s effort to read domicile into the 14th Amendment, none explicitly rejected his argument either. Where several justices instead displayed skepticism was in the government’s proposed definition of domicile. The term generally refers to where a person lives and intends to continue living. As the court explained in a 1983 decision, domicile describes a person’s “permanent home and place of habitation. It is the place where he intends to remain, and to which he expects to return when he leaves.” This broad definition emphasizes an individual’s decision to make that person’s home in a particular location and continue doing so into the future. By contrast, Sauer claimed that domicile requires legal permission to live in a particular location, and that permission is dictated by immigration law. As he told the justices, domicile “is lawful presence with the intent to remain permanently.” During oral arguments, several of the justices signaled their disagreement with Sauer’s definition of domicile. Without mentioning a lawful-presence component, Justice Samuel Alito stated that “a person’s domicile is the place where he or she intends to make a permanent home.” Meanwhile, Justice Neil Gorsuch seemed to directly reject Sauer’s inclusion of a lawfulness requirement. Gorsuch suggested that the legality of a person’s presence in the United States is irrelevant to domicile because in 1868, when the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution, there were few federal laws regulating migration. Unlike today, when a complex series of federal immigration laws impose stringent restrictions on migrants and prospective migrants, “we really didn’t have laws like that” in 1868, Gorsuch told the solicitor general, “so why wouldn’t we, even if we were to apply your own test, come to the conclusion that the fact that someone might be illegal is immaterial”? Sauer disagreed, arguing that the citizenship clause incorporates immigration restrictions enacted by Congress. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also clearly took issue with this claim. According to Jackson, the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution “to prevent future Congresses from being able to affect citizenship.” (Sauer responded just as plainly, saying, “no, I don’t think so.”) Whatever definition of domicile the justices accept, if they agree with the Trump administration that domicile is a required component of birthright citizenship’s constitutional analysis, they will need to then address whose domicile matters. No one disputes that domicile requires assessing where a person chooses to live, so it’s not surprising that they also agree that a child who is too young to decide where to live can’t form a domicile. Instead, a child’s domicile necessarily depends on a parent’s domicile. Responding to questions from Gorsuch, Sauer argued that historical sources don’t distinguish “between mother or father.” There are two problems with Sauer’s claim that domicile doctrine treated mothers and fathers equally. First, it conflicts with Trump’s own executive order, which emphasizes the mother’s immigration status. According to the president’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, a child born in the United States does not acquire citizenship at birth if the mother was not domiciled in the United States because she was living in the country unlawfully or with temporary authorization. Sauer likewise claimed that “it’s really the mother’s domicile, I think, that would matter.” Second, Sauer’s assertion at oral arguments clashes with the Justice Department’s written argument. Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, whose The Law of Nations the government discusses repeatedly in its brief, left no doubt that legal doctrine treated the father’s status as more important than the mother’s. As Vattel explains in a section that the Justice Department’s brief cites, “children follow the condition of their fathers.” Thus, the administration faces an uphill battle. It must not only convince the court to adopt its definition of domicile, but convince a majority of justices that the mother’s domicile is what counts despite no mention of this in the 14th Amendment. The oral argument suggests the government won’t succeed. But we will only know for sure when the court releases its opinion, which likely won’t be before late June. The post Why the Supreme Court’s birthright-citizenship decision may depend on the meaning of “domicile” appeared first on SCOTUSblog.Read more