Author: Kent Scheidegger

U.S. Supreme Court Arguments This Week — Habeas Corpus

by · Oct 13, 2025 3:51 pm

The U.S. Supreme Court has a two-day argument week this week, as today is Columbus Day. Three of the four cases are criminal cases, but none is a blockbuster. We have one case on habeas corpus, one on restitution and retroactivity, and one on the Fourth Amendment and emergency entry to houses. I will discuss the habeas corpus case in this post.

Bowe v. United States, No. 24-5438, on tomorrow’s (Tuesday’s) calendar, relates to a problem interpreting the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) with regard to successive petitions by federal versus state prisoners. An unusual aspect of the case, as far as Supreme Court habeas corpus cases go, is that the petitioner is actually correct, in my opinion. The Solicitors General of both the current and previous administrations think so too on one of the questions, so a special amicus has been appointed to argue in support of the lower court decision. Continue reading . . .

Standing Case in the Supreme Court

by · Oct 10, 2025 11:26 am

One of the requirements to file a civil suit in federal court is “standing.” That is, the plaintiff must have a sufficient interest in the subject matter. Just being against a law on principle is not enough. Determining what interests are sufficient has been a long-standing problem, and the rules are sometimes loosened when they operate, in practice, to completely immunize questionably constitutional laws from any challenge. The case of Bost v. Illinois Board of Elections, which was argued in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, is a standing case.

CJLF has been involved in standing battles in our work on behalf of victims of crime. When we challenge the early release of a murderer or rapist on behalf of a victim or victim’s family, we are regularly met with an objection that the victim has no standing. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has fought us tooth and claw on this, although he is much milder in his objections to third parties seeking to help murderers. (See pp. 14-15 of this brief.) Continue reading . . .

Walgreens Shrugged

by · Oct 9, 2025 11:10 am

Illinois Review has a story headlined “Walgreens Abandons Chicago, Flees a Crime-Infested Downtown Under Pritzker and Johnson.”

Walgreens, one of Illinois’ most iconic companies, is the latest major corporation to abandon downtown Chicago – delivering another blow to Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s claim that the city is safe and open for business.

The Deerfield-based pharmacy chain announced this week it will vacate its massive 200,000-square-foot office space inside Chicago’s Old Post Office, a redevelopment once hailed as proof of the city’s comeback. Instead, Walgreens plans to move back to the suburbs in January 2026, nearly seven years before its lease expires in 2032.

At its peak, the office housed 1,800 employees, serving as a corporate hub for operations and tech teams. But in a city now defined by retail theft, carjackings, and homelessness, downtown has become unrecognizable. Continue reading . . .

New Cases for the New Term

by · Oct 3, 2025 7:29 am

The U.S. Supreme Court’s term begins Monday. As usual, the court held a conference the Monday before to discuss which cases to take up from the long list that accumulated over the summer. A short list of cases taken was released this morning. A long list of orders from the conference will be released Monday. In past years the opening Monday orders list has typically had a long list of denials and no additional grants. Update (10/6): As expected, the Monday orders list has no additional grants.

Today’s list has five cases taken up, all civil cases, and only one even tangentially related to crime. This continues a disturbing pattern of disinterest in fixing the massive number of precedents in criminal law and procedure that are clearly wrong under the current doctrine of interpreting the Constitution according to its original understanding.

The tangentially related case is Wolford v. Lopez, AG of Hawaii, No. 24-1046. This is a gun control case regarding controlled carry on private property. Three years ago, the Supreme Court issued a major decision regarding the Second Amendment and original understanding (or “text, history, and tradition”) in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). Major decisions always involve a lot of detail-filling in the years following. In Wolford, the petitioner asked the high court to review two questions. It took one of them: Continue reading . . .

Walters: Newsom Delusional on Cal. Mask Law

by · Sep 24, 2025 11:35 am

Dan Walters has this column at CalMatters on California Governor Newsom, masked ICE officers, and the recently enacted state statute on masking. “Newsom and any other critics of ICE tactics are delusional if they believe federal officers will be arrested and prosecuted for wearing masks after SB 627 takes effect.” The column headline, probably written by an editor and not by Walters, is oddly equivocal: “Court rulings cast doubt on California mask ban for federal officers.” Walters doesn’t say the ban is in doubt. He says there is no way it will be enforced. Continue reading . . .

Guardsmen as Cops

by · Sep 22, 2025 12:59 pm

Barry Latzer and Peter Moskos have this article in the National Review. Sending in the National Guard for law enforcement has some benefits, but it is not an optimum solution.

But there are limits to what soldiers can do.

First, troops do not have police powers and cannot enforce laws or arrest lawbreakers. They are not trained in the chain-of-custody protocols needed for evidence preservation. Nor can they do the detective work needed to track down suspects.

Second, national guardsmen cannot prepare a case for the prosecutor. This is a vital job for which the police have training. Cops are taught how to interview victims and other witnesses, gather physical evidence, and preserve the chain of custody, and then testify in court to help obtain a conviction. Soldiers can’t do this, and without convictions, offenders cannot be sentenced and incarcerated for their crimes.

Continue reading . . .

Back-from-the-Dead Attack on Habeas Corpus Reform

by · Sep 3, 2025 5:03 pm

Like a bad horror movie, a monster we thought we had killed in a past episode is back. The monster is the notion that the most important element of Congress’s 1996 reform of federal habeas corpus violates Article III of the Constitution because it binds federal courts to state courts’ interpretation of the Constitution, precluding the federal court from exercising independent judgment. In a nutshell, the law requires that when a defendant’s constitutional claim has been decided on the merits in state court, a federal court is precluded from nullifying that judgment on habeas corpus unless the state court was clearly wrong based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

In 1998, Columbia Law Review published an issue devoted to habeas corpus. James Liebman and William Ryan advanced the thesis described above in “Some Effectual Power”: The Quantity and Quality of Decisionmaking Required of the Federal Courts, 98 Colum. L. Rev. 696. I wrote the response article, Habeas Corpus, Relitigation, and The Legislative Power, 98 Colum. L. Rev. 888.

The Supreme Court resolved the issue in Williams v. Taylor, 529 U.S. 362, 411 (2000). The resolution left a lot to be desired, but the result was that 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d) was enforced as the major reform it was intended to be, not watered down to a minor change based on the supposed constitutional limitation. Continue reading . . .

Compulsory Drug Treatment

by · Aug 21, 2025 1:15 pm

As I have noted before on this blog (see, e.g., this post) a major part of the homelessness problem is addiction. Charles Lehman has an article at City Journal titled Compulsory Drug Treatment Works: Activists who say otherwise hide their views behind a cloak of scientific objectivity.

The actual state of the research is not as definitive as that title implies. A big part of the difficulty in evaluating efficacy is the lack of a good comparison group, and there is disagreement as to what comparison is appropriate. Do people compelled to accept treatment do as well as those who seek it out? A “no” answer to that question would prove nothing, as the seekers had a better attitude out of the gate. The actual evidence is mixed.

Is compulsory treatment better than no treatment at all? Lehman cites a couple of studies that find an improvement while conceding that there is a selection bias problem in these studies as well. Random and quasi-random assignment studies are better, and they provide some evidence of a benefit. Continue reading . . .

Studies Confirm Leftward Bias in Higher Education

by · Aug 17, 2025 9:15 am

Anyone who is both honest and paying attention has known for a long time that higher education in the United States is tilted sharply leftward, and the bias has only gotten worse over the years. Two recent studies confirm how bad it has gotten.

Jon Shields and Yuval Avnur have an op-ed in the WSJ with the unfortunate title, Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias: A massive database shows college courses dealing with race and the Middle East lean sharply left. I say unfortunate because any mention of President Trump triggers vehement reactions among people with TDS, and the issue is not about him. It existed long before he was President, and any solution will take time well beyond his departure.

The study uses a database that scrapes college syllabi from the web, including the assigned reading. The authors look particularly at the issue of race in the criminal justice system, and the result confirms what I have observed over years of hiring recent graduates. Continue reading . . .