Whitespace is like air: it is necessary for design to breathe
Update: Ohio Attorney General DeWine appealed the stay of execution order in the Lorraine case to the U.S. Supreme Court. On February 8, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift the stay of execution.
As I have previously written here and here, Justice Paul Pfeifer has really stepped up his public criticism of Ohio’s…
In my last post, I wrote about recusal at the supreme court level. That’s when a justice has to get off a case because of some kind of conflict. In recent times, the reverse of recusal has emerged. We now have “unrecusal.”
One of the most common reasons a judge has to get off a…
In March, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear more than five hours of arguments challenging President Obama’s signature Affordable Health Care Act . There have been rumblings from the right and the left seeking to force Justices Kagan and Thomas to recuse (remove) themselves from this case, albeit for entirely different reasons. In…
Update: The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in U.S. v. Jones on January 23. Read the analysis of that decision here.
Both the Ohio Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court are considering the same issue—is the warrantless placement of a GPS on a car and the resulting constant surveillance constitutional. Read the posts…
It all began January 18, 2011 at Justice Paul Pfeifer’s swearing-in ceremony for his current (and now last) term. In his remarks, which he stated might make everyone in the room uncomfortable, he talked about Ohio’s death penalty. He said that he had concluded “that it is exceedingly difficult for this statute to be administered…
State Issue One, the legislatively-referred proposal to amend the Ohio Constitution to raise the age at which a judge could run for or be appointed to a judicial office from 70 to 75 was overwhelmingly defeated, despite the strong endorsement from Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor and most of the state’s newspapers.
Curiously, the measure was…
The Ohio Judicial Center, which houses the Supreme Court of Ohio, is going to be named for Thomas J. Moyer, our late Chief Justice. The official ceremony will be December 2. Interestingly, the naming idea was first floated by then-Governor Ted Strickland, a Democrat. Moyer was a Republican, but the two men developed a great…
For those interested in the question of at what age a judge should retire, Judge Pat Fischer of the First District Court of Appeals and I discussed this on Dan Hurley’s Newsmakers program on Local 12 Sunday October 23. Link is below–
http://www.law.uc.edu/news/issue-one-bettman
Read my earlier post on this topic here.
A long time ago, judges used to ride circuit, meaning go out into the district to hear cases. The Supreme Court of Ohio is doing exactly that tomorrow, hearing cases at the Highland County Court House in Hillsboro. This is part of the Off-Site Court Program, started in 1987 by the late Chief Justice Tom…
Death penalty decisions from the Ohio Supreme Court are long, depressing, and different. Long because the defendants raise every conceivable argument they can, even if the issues they raise have been decided many times. Depressing because of the facts and circumstances of the cases and the horror involved. Different because there is no denying it—a…
