All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Like Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the High Court itself had humble beginnings in New York City.

It was the nation's capital when Chief Justice John Jay convened the first session in 1790.

While the Constitution created the Court, it left the organizational details to Congress.

The Court first exercised the power to declare a law unconstitutional in 1803 in Marbury versus Madison.

While the Senate has the power to confirm or reject Supreme Court nominees, it didn't hold the first hearing until 1916, when Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice. And while some nominees testified at their hearings, that wasn't the norm until 1955.

The Court is constant but it is not static. It evolves and continues to bring those "firsts" that indicate - as one law professor so eloquently stated - even "if it's not in touch with the weather of the day, it's in touch with the climate of the age."

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

How will a Latina woman from the Bronx interpret the words of a bunch of old white guys called the Founding Fathers?

That's the Cliffs Notes version of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

For Democrats like Senator Patrick Leahy, hers is a success story, "for which we all can take pride."

Some Republicans meanwhile are questioning if that pride leads to prejudice. This week several of them will cite this quote: "A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life and those life experiences."

Was that empathy or was it politics?

Her confirmation is nearly foolproof given the Democrats' control of the Senate, but it will be very interesting to hear how she answers the questions and how the conversation moves from her quintessentially American story to how she'll apply the rule of law for all Americans.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

The police stormed into their Virginia bedroom one night in 1958, shone flashlights into their eyes, and asked the white man: Who’s this woman you are sleeping with? “I’m his wife,” Mildred Loving replied and the rest, quite literally, became a vital part of American legal history.

The Lovings, Mildred and Richard, were an interracial couple who had married five weeks before the cops came calling that night. At the time, in Virginia and many other places, it was a crime for a white to marry a black or for any other “miscegenation.” Thanks to the Lovings, and a fight that lasted nearly a decade, that all changed in 1967 when the Supreme Court unanimously struck down such laws nationwide.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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Remember how the world was going to end depending upon which side in the same-sex marriage debate prevailed in court? Remember all the television coverage – all the shouting and whining – that surrounded the 2003 ruling in Massachusetts that legalized same-sex marriage? Remember the hullabaloo in 2004 caused by San Francisco’s mayor authorizing the issuance of thousands of same-sex marriage licenses until the city was forced to stop?

Well, guess what. The issue and the debate and the story haven’t gone away. All that is missing is the nation’s attention span.

While you were focusing earlier this week upon whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were successfully wooing super-delegates, or whether Mike Huckabee was finally going to come in from the cold on the Republican side, the California Supreme Court Tuesday heard oral argument for three hours in separate cases designed to flesh out the contours of the same-sex marriage debate.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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I make predictions about Supreme Court decisions about as often as the Justices agree unanimously on contentious issues, which is say, almost never. But I am prepared to go out on the legal limb in the lethal injection case out of Kentucky which the High Court yesterday agreed to consider and decide during the looming term.

By a 5-4 vote, I predict, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing the majority opinion, the Court next spring will declare invalid the lethal injection procedures Kentucky and certain other states employ when they execute capital defendants. The decision will then force all “lethal injection” states to do what some already are doing, which is to revamp their execution protocols to ensure that the condemned are given the proper amount of the proper medications in the proper order so they don’t endure “cruel and unusual punishment” before they die.

The Court’s most conservative quartet—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito—will offer a stinging dissent that focuses upon the rights of states to determine for themselves their own execution protocols. And if Justice Scalia gets to write that dissent I’m fairly confident that we’ll see a line or two about what he considers the “absurdity” of spending so much time and effort ensuring that a death row inmate about to be killed in the name of the people is treated like a patient in the finest hospital in the world.

Okay, I’m done with my predictions. The case is titled Baze v. Rees and here is the Kentucky court ruling which now goes up on appeal. No one who follows the Court should be surprised that the Justices have agreed to resolve this issue. The Justices in recent years have been consistently willing to limit the contours of capital punishment in America—they abolished, for example, a state’s right to execute mentally retarded murders and also those who killed when they were younger than 18 years old. The trend, then, favors the condemned...

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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Now, as Congress contemplates contempt citations against officials who have refused to honor subpoenas, we learn that the White House is ordering the Justice Department not to pursue any contempt charges against those officials even if Congress asks the federal prosecutors to do so. Double-dare you, the White House is saying (with great taunting motions) to the lawmakers.

The Washington Post reports this morning that the White House has harkened back to a Reagan-era legal memo to broaden its executive privilege claim to cover referrals of Congressional contempt citations to Justice. The idea is that once the President asserts the privilege, and once the people over whom he asserted it refuse to cooperate with the Congress, there is nothing the legislators can do to force their local U.S. Attorney to bring charges against those people; the assertion of the privilege, alone, is enough to give them a sort of practical immunity from punishment even though they’ve blown off a subpoena.

You get the feeling in this ugly battle of the branches that the White House is trying to take and hold as much ground as possible before the court fight begins. And you get the feeling from and among Democrats on Capitol Hill that if they are going to get any satisfaction here—not to mention answers to their legitimate questions about the prosecutor purge-- they are going to have to take this dispute to court and hope for the best with a conservative judiciary (including an increasingly conservative Supreme Court).

The White House strategy here is consistent with the controversial “unitary executive” theory, which posits that all executive branch power resides with the President and not with any other executive branch officials or agencies or departments. The administration’s reliance upon this theory probably helps explain why the Justice Department is currently run by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose next independent act in office will be his first independent act in office.

And remember, too, that the newest Supreme Court Justice, Samuel A. Alito, Jr. already is on record as being a big fan of that “unitary” theory. He’s going to be the swing vote if this fight ever makes it to the High Court. It’s no wonder, then, that the White House figures it can push the “executive privilege” argument beyond the point where it has gone before—or at least beyond the point where any court has so far recognized it has a right to go.

This is “in your face” politics at its most grotesque...

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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The Supreme Court offered no happy endings Thursday when it closed out its October 2006 with a whimper disguised as a bang. Well, not so much a whimper as a whispered promise of a whole new generation of lawsuits brought by parents of students who feel they’ve been deprived of some right to attend some school for some reason having to do with race.

The nation’s legal and political communities—not to mention millions of affected parents—watched and waited all term long for some sort of clarity and finality in the area of how far public school officials can go in using racial “components” to determine student bodies. On the last day of its term, the Court instead gave us all more ambiguous standards, more mealy-mouthed phrases, and more uncertainty. It is now significantly more difficult for school administrators to justify policies that include race as a factor in determining admission; but it is not impossible for them to do so. And everyone ought to try to work together toward some sort of diversity in public schools. Got it?

There was the most conservative opinion, which garnered only four votes, the slightly less conservative opinion, which held the field because it included Justice Anthony’s Kennedy’s concurrence, and the least conservative opinions, offered by the tamed lions of the Court’s left. Taken together they portray not just a bitterly divided group of nine smart judges but also a new legal doctrine that is just as muddled as the one it purports to replace...

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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Forgive me for not jumping on the anti-Supreme Court bandwagon when it comes to Tuesday's big employment discrimination case. Yes, I believe the result in the Ledbetter case is absurd — how in the world can an employee be responsible for suing in a timely manner for discrimination if he or she is unaware of the discrimination? But I do not blame the court’s conservative majority for the problem. I blame Congress and the administration-- and you should, too.

The court’s majority did not create out of thin air the rules that say you have to sue within 180 days of the initiation of the discrimination in the workplace (whether you know about it or not). The pro-corporation firm of Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Scalia did not go out of its way to stick it to employees for the benefit of employers (although you'd be forgiven for thinking so given their track records in cases like this).

The justices simply followed the fairly clear reading of the federal laws that applied to the case. And the federal law was enacted by Congress and implemented by the White House through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If you want to blame someone or something for poor Ms. Ledbetter’s plight, blame the lawmakers and the bureaucrats at the EEOC. Heck, blame the White House itself. But don’t blame the justices.

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Remember the United States Supreme Court? The nine justices who make up our high court and their small cadre of law clerks and other official helpers are falling noticeably behind in their work. There are only six weeks or so of official business left before the 2006-2007 term expires and the world is waiting on about 30 decisions in cases argued since last October. As the great Court watcher Tony Mauro put it: “it’s going to be a busy June.”

Actually, strike that. It is going to be a busy late May.

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Katie is on her way back from Blacksburg, Virginia. So today's First Look at the broadcast comes from Wyatt Andrews, who offers a preview of his story on the Supreme Court ruling on what the law calls partial birth abortion. Click the monitor for details.