Close to 100 attorneys, progressive advocates and Triangle-area residents gathered today to discuss the continuing judicial vacancy on the U.S.District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, growing numbers of federal judicial vacancies elsewhere, delayed U.S. Senate confirmations of presidential nominees, and the ongoing need for increased diversity on the bench.

Speakers at the event, “Why Courts Matter,” included 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James A. Wynn, Jr. and Andrew Blotky, director of Legal Progress at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

As Blotky pointed out, there are 82 current vacancies on the federal bench, with an additional 20 vacancies that will occur this year — meaning that nearly 65 percent of the population lives in a community with a courtroom vacancy.

And while it took roughly 35 days for the Senate to get George W. Bush’s nominees to a vote, it’s taken 150 days for Barack Obama’s to get to that point.

Both Wynn and Blotky called for the quick confirmation of fair, impartial, clear-thinking and diverse judges to fill those vacancies — which even when filled, Wynn added, would only solve the backlog. The U.S. Judicial Conference has called for the creation of additional judgeships to meet caseload demand.

The judges who sit on the U.S.District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina handle one of the heaviest caseloads in the country, approaching nearly 800 cases per judge in 2012.  And they’ve been waiting for help for close to eight years now.

The court, based in Raleigh but with courtrooms elsewhere along the eastern part of the state, now has the dubious distinction of having the oldest federal judicial vacancy in the country.  The seat, opened up on Dec. 31, 2005 when Judge Malcolm J. Howard took senior status, has been unfilled for more than 2500 days.  Read More…

From the annals of  ”we have seen the future,”  Mother Jones schools us on what’s happened in Florida under two years of Tea Party control:

In just one year, Scott and his conservative allies slashed state spending by $4 billion even as they cut corporate taxes. They’ve rejected billions in federal funds in one of the states hardest hit by the recession. They’ve axed everything from health care and public transportation initiatives to mosquito control and water supply programs.

The results are not pretty.

According to WRAL, the bill to block the application of foreign law in North Carolina courts, H695,  is headed to  the House floor with compromised language, following a contentious fight in the Judiciary Committee this morning.

The bill as initially drafted — and unsuccessfully introduced by Rep. George Cleveland in 2011 — would preclude the application of foreign law by “a court, administrative agency, arbitrator, or mediator . . .  if doing so would violate a legal or constitutional right of one more natural persons who are parties to the proceeding.”

Though not expressly mentioning Sharia or other religious law, the bill (and its look-a-likes in other states) originated in model form with the American Public Policy Alliance’s “American Laws for American Courts” initiative, which was expressly directed at Sharia law.

Similar bills have been proposed in at least 32 states since 2010, according to the Pew Research Center, but have been enacted into law  in only seven.  The bills typically run into resistance from both the courts, which view such laws as a threat to judicial independence, and the business community, which views them as antithetical to the development of an international, business-friendly environment.

The watered-down version of the bill apparently limits the restriction to family law and child custody issues — areas in which there have yet to be foreign law problems that would be remedied by such a law, as admitted by Rules Chairman Tim Moore, who helped craft the change. Per WRAL:

Moore said he didn’t know of any cases in which NC courts have allowed Sharia or any other foreign laws to infringe on anyone’s constitutional rights, but said the sponsors were trying to prevent that from happening.

The three-judge panel handling the redistricting case has ordered two days of hearings in June to consider specific factual issues before deciding the parties’ respective requests for judgment in their favor.

The judges have asked for testimony and additional evidence in two separate areas.

First, were challenged districts subject to the Voting Rights Act drawn in places where racially-polarized voting existed — i.e., where black voters in the minority of voters were unable to elect candidates of  their choice — and was the drawing of such districts a reasonable response under the Act?

And second, in certain districts not subject to the Act (Senate 31 and 32, House 51 and 54, Congressional 4 and 12), where a majority black voting population was not achieved during redistricting, is there additional evidence that race nonetheless was the predominant factor in drawing those districts?

The hearings are scheduled for June 4 and 5.

Scotusblog’s Lyle Denniston has this enlightening look at what’s likely going on inside the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices consider their positions on the two marriage equality cases argued there six weeks ago.

On whether public opinion and state legislative action on the issue might be part of the conversations between and among the justices, Denniston says:

It is not difficult to imagine that one of the lines of conversation or of the written exchanges is whether the court needs to take a definite position on the constitutional questions at this point, because the legislatures are taking on the issue at an apparently increasing pace, and the trend is running strongly in favor of expanding marriage rights.If the majority is moving toward embracing same-sex marriage, the political trend in that same direction is an argument for deciding the pending cases only on very narrow grounds, or for finding a way to bypass them. But if the majority is leaning against such marriages, the political trend in the opposite direction might counsel against a ruling that could signify an attempt to stifle the trend, to keep it from spreading to other states.

Such contentions might sound like political argument, but they are institutional claims. The use of judicial power is a strong instrument in a democratic society, and the court has a long tradition of trying to avoid major constitutional judgments if they are not really necessary. Although it has often been said that the court follows the election returns, a “bandwagon effect” seldom drives Supreme Court decisions on the meaning of the Constitution.