Authored by managing attorney Corrie Woods, SCOPAblog is the only publication providing comprehensive, monthly coverage of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania's precedential opinions and allocatur grants. This docket review is an unbiased resource beneficial to litigators and legal professionals across the state.
Occasionally, Corrie discusses pressing decisions at greater length on The Standard of Review podcast, featuring guest attorneys from the Pittsburgh region.
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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 ...
