SCOPAblog

This month, the Court issued 13 precedential opinions (linked below) and 2 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, the Court's decisions in Small and Chmiel are boons for criminal defense attorneys. In Small, the Court abrogated the presumption that petitioners for relief pursuant to the ...

This month, the Court issued 4 precedential opinions (linked below) and 6 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, two big elections cases this month. In Pennsylvania Democratic Party,the Court faced several questions concerning the Commonwealth's new no-excuse mail-in (or hand-in) voting ...

This month, the Court issued 5 precedential opinions (linked below) and 9 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, there is nothing particularly earth-shattering, but a special complement of the Court in Reid reiterated that a new judicial decision does not, in and of itself, allow similar...

This month, the Court issued 17 precedential opinions (linked below) and 2 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, the most headline-grabbing case is Wolf, in which the Court granted the Governor's request to declare the General Assembly's legislative veto of his coronavirus-related emerg...

This month, the Court issued 11 precedential opinions (linked below) and 10 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, the most striking case is Torsilleri, in which the Court appears to be continuing its recent course of holding legislative enactments up to stringent constitutional review. ...

This month, the Court issued 7 precedential opinions (linked below) and 2 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, two items of note for the appellate practitioner, and both tend to point toward the Court's increasing comfort with limiting prudential doctrines that, depending on your point...

This month, the Court issued 12 precedential opinions (linked below) and 6 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, the most topical decision is Friends of Danny Devito (no, not that Danny Devito; this one is a Republican candidate for state representative in Allegheny County). In that cas...

This month, the Court issued 5 precedential opinions (linked below) and 6 orders granting allocatur. Two observations of note this month. First, it is notable that 3 of the 11 items below deal with child sexual abuse, with two opinions coming down on the side of robust investigation and monitorin...

This month, the Court issued 8 precedential opinions (linked below) and 7 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, the most newsworthy case is probably Briggs. In Briggs, the Court rejected an attempt by an fracking company (and an onslaught of fracking industry amici) to transform the co...

This month, the Court issued 4 precedential opinions (linked below) and 5 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, although Baldwin will likely be the most media-covered case issued this month (because it is tangentially related to the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal), this auth...

This month, the Court issued 2 precedential opinions (linked below) and 5 orders granting allocatur (or its equivalent). On the opinion side, the more salient of the two is clearly Weeks, which held that the Commonwealth Court did not abuse its discretion in failing to preliminarily enjoin the e...

This month, the Court issued 12 precedential opinions (linked below) and 7 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, the court is continuing its course of protecting (or arguably expanding) the rights of civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants against corporate and governmental institution...

This month, the Court issued 9 precedential opinions (linked below) and 4 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, it is a good month to be a plaintiff's medical malpractice attorney, as the Court's decision in Yanakos has opened up a whole new population of potential clients by declaring ...

This month, the Court issued 10 precedential opinions (linked below) and 16 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, it is a tale of two cities: while the Court's criminal opinions address some interesting issues — individual privacy rights in Turpin and the criminal justice system's econ...

This month, the Court issued 7 precedential opinions (linked below) and 2 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, the Court continues on its course of striking a more balanced approach to criminal procedural rights and tort liability than its earlier, more conservative iterations. An int...

This June, the Court issued its decision in Working Families Party v. Commonwealth, 34 EAP 2017 (“WFP”), rejecting a claim by a Democratic and would-be-also-WFP candidate, the WFP, and several WFP-aligned voters that the “anti-fusion” provisions of Pennsylvania's Election Code, which prohibit a ...

This month, the Court issued 15 precedential opinions (linked below) and 6 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, although, as I mentioned last month, the “new” Court has been somewhat ambivalent in its attitudes toward the judicial role, with some Justices preferring the prudence (or, d...

This month, the Court issued 7 precedential opinions (linked below) and 8 orders granting allocatur. On the opinion side, a few insights. Now two years into its current composition, the Court is somewhat ambivalent in its orientation toward precedent. A narrow, but fairly consistent majority of t...

Hi, everyone! Corrie here. Some of you know that I spent roughly six years of my career as an attorney for a Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. It was an honor, not only because I came to love the Court's history and to admire the Court at its best (during my time there, the Court issued ...