By Josh WolffResearch Attorney, Illinois Appellate Court, First District
The Association’s April
2017 luncheon will feature Erwin Chemerinsky, the renowned legal scholar and
dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Chemerinsky
recently wrote an article for the ABA Journal discussing how the United State’s
Supreme Court’s lack of a ninth justice has affected its docket.
Chemerinsky observed that,
at the end of the Court’s first month, its docket only had 39 cases, which was “significantly
fewer than usual for this point of the term.” In addition to the smaller
docket, Chemerinsky noted that the effect of only eight justices could be seen by
looking at the Court’s December schedule for oral argument. “Four of the six
days that the court is hearing arguments, the justices will hear only one case,
rather than the two, or occasionally three, cases usually heard per day.”
Chemerinsky also believed
that the Court is waiting for the appointment of a ninth justice for some cases
that were granted review last January and have already been fully briefed,
but remain without a date for oral argument. Those cases include: Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia,Missouri v. Pauley, which “concerns whether it violates free exercise of
religion or denies equal protection for a state to give aid (the material for
the bottom of playgrounds) to public and secular private schools, but not to
religious schools”; Wisconsin v. Murr,
which concerns “the takings clause and how it is determined whether adjacent
pieces of property should be deemed to be one or two pieces of property”; and Microsoft v. Baker, which concerns “whether
plaintiffs can appeal the denial of class certification by dismissing their
suit.”
The full article can be
accessed here.
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