High Court

WASHINGTON — In a case that could end with the Supreme Court deciding how much free speech to allow on its own doorstep, a federal judge has thrown out a law barring processions and expressive banners on the Supreme Court grounds. The law is so broad, the judge said, that it could criminalize preschool students parading on their first field trip to the high court. Harold Hodge Jr. was arrested on the Supreme Court plaza in January 2011 while wearing a sign that criticized police...

___ Grocers allege potato group pumped up spud prices BOISE, Idaho — A U.S. wholesale grocer says America's potato farmers have run an illegal price-fixing cartel for a decade, driving up spud prices while spying on farmers with satellites and aircraft fly-overs to enforce strict limits on how many tubers they can grow. Kansas-based Associated Wholesale Grocers' lawsuit against United Potato Growers of America and two dozen other defendants was shifted this week to U.S. District Court in Idaho, America's top potato-producing state, which provides...

FOUR YEARS AGO, 15-year-old Edgar Coker Jr. pleaded guilty to a crime he did not commit after his lawyer warned that he could be prosecuted as an adult and subjected to a lengthy prison term if he fought the charges. Two months later, after Edgar had been sent to a juvenile facility, the 14-year-old girl who accused him of raping her recanted and said she made up the story after her mother walked in on the young couple. The girl's mother has acknowledged the lie and is now advocating on his behalf.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has come up with a new regulation banning demonstrations on its grounds, two days after a broader anti-demonstration law was declared unconstitutional. The regulation bans activities on the court's grounds or building such as picketing, speech-making, marching, vigils or religious services "that involve the communication or expression of views or grievances, engaged in by one or more persons, the conduct of which is reasonably likely to draw a crowd or...

The most dramatic stories in any field of competitive endeavor are those that recount events that almost never happened. It's the scoreless ballgames that end with a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth that linger in the psyches of winners and losers -- not the 9-3 walkovers. So it is in politics and government. Al Gore's loss to George W. Bush gnaws at Democrats because he came so close -- a few hundred more votes in Florida or a couple of thousand in New Hampshire, and history would be different.

The Supreme Court on Thursday upended a century's worth of campaign finance law . An immediate question raised by the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision is whether this will flood elections with suddenly legal corporate money. Less understood but deeply significant is what this shows about the court and its relationship to the Obama administration and Congress. This far-reaching ruling augurs a significant power struggle. For the first time since 1937, an increasingly conservative federal judiciary...

Supreme Court justices' personal investments are making it more difficult for the court to do business. The court said yesterday that it could not raise a quorum to consider review of a wide-ranging class-action lawsuit that accuses more than 50 U.S. businesses of helping South Africa's former apartheid regime. According to the court, only five of the nine justices could hear the case, and six are needed for a quorum. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. have holdings...

EVEN BEFORE the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to President Obama's health-care program, outside interest groups were a ngling to elbow out the justices they fear would not rule their way. Liberal groups argue that Justice Clarence Thomas should disqualify himself because of his wife's work on behalf of conservative groups that opposed the legislation. Conservatives raise questions about Justice Elena Kagan's impartiality because she was the president's solicitor general while the legislation and its legal defense...

The Supreme Court said Monday that it will decide whether two people can do the work of five when it comes to resolving labor-management disputes in the workplace. The National Labor Relations Board, which for decades has had the responsibility of policing similar disputes, has operated with two members -- and three vacancies -- for more than a year. The reason for this is that Democrats who retook control of Congress in 2006 objected to President George W. Bush's labor policies and thus refused to confirm his nominees.

The court agreed to consider throwing out a human rights lawsuit against a former prime minister of Somalia who is accused of overseeing killings and other atrocities. A federal judge said Mohamed Ali Samantar could not be sued, but an appeals court said the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act applies to countries, not to people. The court agreed to clarify whether new, harsher penalties for sex offenders who do not register with state sex offender databases can be imposed retroactively on people who broke the law...

WASHINGTON — In a case that could end with the Supreme Court deciding how much free speech to allow on its own doorstep, a federal judge has thrown out a law barring processions and expressive banners on the Supreme Court grounds. The law is so broad, the judge said, that it could criminalize preschool students parading on their first field trip to the high court. Harold Hodge Jr. was arrested on the Supreme Court plaza in January 2011 while wearing a sign that criticized police...

Mississippi's Supreme Court postponed Tuesday's scheduled execution of Willie Jerome Manning, days after federal authorities acknowledged errors in FBI forensic testimony at his 1994 trial and just five hours before he was to die by lethal injection. The court gave no reasoning for its decision, nor did it say what further action might be taken or when. Manning was convicted of killing Mississippi State University students Jon Steckler and Tiffany Miller, whose bodies were...

Immigrants who are convicted of minor marijuana offenses are not subject to mandatory deportation, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. Those whose crime amounts to a "social sharing of a small amount of marijuana" should be able to at least ask the attorney general to spare them automatic deportation, the court ruled 7 to 2. The court sided with Adrian Moncrieffe , who came to the United States legally from Jamaica in 1984 when he was 3...

It was quite a coup for Lewis & Clark Law School to land Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to preside over its moot court competition earlier this month. But the event has not produced the kind of headlines that Dean Robert Klonoff had hoped. Indeed, it is the lack of a headline — in the college's newspaper the Pioneer Log — that has caused all of the trouble. Klonoff and administrators of the Portland, Ore., college pressured the paper's editor not to publish a story about...

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Maryland Senate has voted to extend a state law that allows police to take DNA samples from arrestees for certain violent crimes. The Senate voted 39-7 to pass the bill on Thursday, sending it to Gov. Martin O'Malley who supports the law. The law, which took effect in 2009, was set to expire in December. The measure extends it indefinitely. The U.S. Supreme Court heard a case challenging the law earlier this year. The high court has yet to...

WASHINGTON — In nearly two hours of arguments on Wednesday (March 27), the Supreme Court heard many of the expected cases for and against recognizing gay marriage: that refusing to do so is blatant discrimination, that gay marriage is a social experiment that the court should not preempt, that Washington has no role in state marriage laws. Yet it was arcane arguments over matters of legal standing that seemed to most animate the justices, reflecting what seemed to be a desire to find a way for the court...

Tom Goldstein -- attorney, blogger, walking sound-bite machine -- was a guest at last week's White House rollout for Sonia Sotomayor, and moments later was holding forth on the lawn for NBC, MSNBC and Bloomberg before heading to CBS and CNN and calling back newspaper reporters from the car. By the next day, shuttling between studios, Goldstein felt frustrated with the cable debates over the Supreme Court nominee. "They have wing nut-person X who says she's an incredibly liberal ideologue without respect for the law, and in that...

The Supreme Court this week will consider whether to apply the brakes to what critics have called a vague and limitless law that has proved essential to federal prosecutors going after corrupt politicians and greedy corporate executives. The court has taken the unusual step of accepting three cases that raise challenges to a federal anti-fraud provision that has been key to the prosecutions of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former Illinois governor George Ryan (R) and executives involved in the collapse of Enron.

WASHINGTON — Isn't it remarkable, attorney Ted Olson said after arguing for same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court on Tuesday (March 26), that the other side wasn't really arguing against it? "No one really offered a defense," he said of his opponents' bid to uphold Proposition 8, the 2008 California referendum that effectively ended gay marriage in the state by defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The question inside the courtroom was not so much can there be gay marriage, but "how do you...

John J. "Jack" Mitchell Jr., 72, who retired in 1998 as associate general counsel at what is now the Government Accountability Office, died March 8 at the ManorCare nursing home in Arlington. The cause was cancer, said his brother, Jerome E. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell worked at what was the General Accounting Office from 1968 to 1995. According to his brother, Mr. Mitchell had a role assisting the Senate Judiciary Committee during confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme...