The Great Writ

After over 10 years on a different platform, I find myself starting all over on WordPress. The Great Writ started as a means to comment on what was then a fairly steady trickle of habeas corpus cases issued by our federal courts. These cases involve, for the most part, federal court review of state and federal court decisions in criminal cases which the convicted claim are contrary to the constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. I created several fairly simple sorting rules to decide which cases to focus on. First, with rare exceptions, I only focus on cases from the Federal Circuit Courts. These decisions tended to be fairly dispositive decisions on discrete habeas corpus issues. My second rule, which I never deviate from, is to focus only on reported cases rather than unreported decisions.

During COVID, the steady trickle of cases became a stream of decisions. One suspects that COVID gave appellate courts the time to clear their dockets of habeas cases that had been accumulating over time. Now that COVID has receded, the number of cases has returned to a trickle – and not even a steady trickle at that. However, the recent attempt to deport a number of aliens by the current administration has offered a new source of habeas cases to examine. In both the cases involving the Alien Enemies Act and those involving student protesters, the great writ has been a vehicle to advance the claims of those protesting their detention and potential deportation.

I have discovered, much to my disappointment, that migrating my entire blog into this new platform is too complicated and or expensive to justify the effort. So, as an alternative, I will add the last few posts from my prior blog as a means of providing some background to what has been happening recently. In addition, as I discover more of the nuances of this new platform, I hope to modify the appearance to replicate much of what was on my prior blog. Bear with me as we work through this together.