As summer turns to fall, the new Supreme Court term is just two weeks away.  While (with one notable exception), the Supreme Court rarely decides elections, Supreme Court decisions can alter the rules for elections and often become an issue in the campaign.  Before leaving at the end of June, the Supreme Court had already accepted a significant number of cases for this term.  Normally, they accept enough cases to fill the fall (October, November, and December) argument sessions with a handful left over for January.  This time (while they have not yet officially published the December argument list), there are more argument slots available than cases.  This post will focus on the cases already accepted.  These cases will be heard between now and mid-December,  with most of them likely to be decided around the time that the major presidential primaries are taking place.  The next post will look at cases that might be accepted for the spring arguments.

October is looking very much like criminal procedure month (with two days set aside for death penalty cases and a juvenile homicide case).  On other cases, there is an interesting case from  my neck of the woods (Hawkins v. Community Bank of Raymore) involving the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.  Among the provisions of the Act, the Act forbids banks from discriminating based on marital status.  In this case, the bank (as a condition of a loan to a small business) required the owners’ wives to personally guarantee the loans.  When the business could not repay the loan, the bank sued the wives who in turn claim that requiring them to guarantee the loan was discrimination based on marital status.

Another potentially interesting case from October (Campbell-Ewald Company v. Gomes) involves class-actions.  In a class-action, one individual seeks to purse claims on behalf of a group of individuals who have similar claims.  Part of the process requires the trial court to hold a hearing to determine whether the individual is sufficiently similar to the other members of the group (among other factors) in order to determine whether to allow the case to proceed as a class-action.  In this case, the defendant offered to pay the plaintiff’s claim in full before the hearing.  The primary issue is whether, under those circumstances, the class-action can proceed or does the settlement offer effectively eliminate the plaintiff. Continue Reading...