Many of the Supreme Court’s rulings don’t split the justices along the party lines of the presidents who appointed them. But several 6-3 splits on Tuesday morning alone provide a telling snapshot of the high court as its latest term comes to a close in the days ahead.

Rulings authored by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett show the GOP-appointed supermajority taking a narrow view of people’s rights and a broad view of U.S. corporate rights in a series of unrelated cases, while the Democratic-appointed justices are confined to sounding alarms in dissent.

Thomas led the six-justice majority in Blanche v. Lau, an immigration case. An appeals court said a border officer didn’t adequately respect an immigrant’s lawful permanent residency status, but the high court majority said the law didn’t require what the lower court claimed.

In her dissent for the three Democratic appointees, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the majority’s view “cannot possibly be what Congress intended” when it passed the law in question. She said she worries that the majority “handed the Government a massive blank check” for immigration proceedings going forward.

That theme of opposing legal interpretations — and the stark consequences that follow — runs throughout Tuesday’s cases, including in the opinion Gorsuch authored in Landor v. Louisiana. He led the six-justice majority against Damon Landor, a Rastafarian man who wanted to sue Louisiana prison officials for monetary damages after they cut his dreadlocks.

The Trump appointee said Landor couldn’t find that right in the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Jackson led the Democratic appointees in dissent in that one, too, writing that the majority “reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements — federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more — to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party.”

Kavanaugh wrote for the majority in Exxon Mobil Cop. v. Corporación CIMEX, siding with the U.S. oil company over Cuba-owned companies, ruling that the latter aren’t immune from being sued over the Cuban government’s confiscation of American property. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent for the Democratic appointees accused the majority of reaching an outcome that couldn’t be found in the relevant laws, which she said she would have applied “as Congress wrote them.”

In another ruling backing a U.S. corporation, Barrett’s opinion in Cisco Systems v. Doe blocked a lawsuit against the tech company from plaintiffs who said China’s government persecuted them due to their religious beliefs and that Cisco enabled that persecution with its surveillance technology. She wrote that courts can’t “create new causes of action for violations of international norms” under the Alien Tort Statute and that the Torture Victim Protection Act doesn’t provide for aiding-and-abetting liability.

Barrett recognized that cases brought under those laws “frequently involve heinous and inhumane acts,” but she said that while political and international actors “may well provide redress,” the majority declined “to distort the statutory text or the Constitution’s allocation of powers to enlist U. S. courts in that project.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent had a different concern. She said the majority “closes the courthouse doors” not only on the plaintiffs in that case but also “to virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law” under the Alien Tort Statute. She said the court did so by overruling precedent without even admitting it, in a case that she said “marks yet another low point in this Court’s esteem for its precedents.”

Sotomayor called the majority’s ruling “yet another notch in its belt, unabashedly remaking the law in its preferred image.” In fixating on the separation of powers, she said, “the majority ignores the foundations of its own and shakes the public’s confidence in the stable and predictable development of the law.”

Jackson and Kagan didn’t fully join Sotomayor’s dissent because, as Jackson explained in a short separate opinion joined by Kagan, she agreed with Sotomayor’s analysis of the Alien Tort Statute but thought the majority correctly found that the Torture Victim Protection Act doesn’t carry aiding-and-abetting liability. Yet Jackson and Kagan made clear that they joined Sotomayor in the language quoted above that called out the majority’s approach.

And to be sure, not all of the court’s rulings on Tuesday divided the justices along party lines. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a more (but not completely) unanimous court in Pung v. Isabella County, regarding how to calculate what the government owes people when it sells their property in tax foreclosure sales.

The court is next set to issue rulings on Thursday. There are about a dozen cases left to decide before the justices break for the summer, including on President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. If the April hearing is any indication, the president is poised to lose that one by a greater margin than 6-3.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

The post Supreme Court’s 6-3 split is on display in cases on religion, immigration and more appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.