Craft & Sheppard's Supreme Court Review

Brief Reviews

Briefly, the Court (1) authorized railroads to mount challenges to state law ad valorem taxes; (2) noted that states constitutionally may impose a tax on multistate businesses under unitary business principles, but cast doubt on the operational function test;  (3) concluded that an assignee of a legal claim for money owed has standing to sue in federal court even if the assignee has agreed to remit money collected from suit to the assignor; (4) by plurality, upheld a state Voter ID law from constitutional attack; (5) found that doctrine of patent exhaustion – once a patented item is lawfully sold, there is no restriction on its use to be implied for the patentee’s benefit – applied to method patents; (6) ruled that defense counsel alone may consent to a magistrate judge's presiding over voir dire and jury selection in a felony trial and that a defendant’s consent is unnecessary; (7) without the government filing an appeal or cross appeal, determined that  federal appellate courts sua sponte could not order an increase in defendant’s sentence; (8) held under the Federal Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2680(c), exceptions to U.S. waiver of sovereign immunity for torts committed by federal employees do not include Bureau of Prisons officials; (9) disapproved of the doctrine of virtual representation whereby the outcome of a suit filed by one unrelated party in one circuit is dispositive of the outcome of a second suit by another person in a different circuit; and (10) held the statute of limitations was a jurisdictional limit in filing suits in the Court of Federal Claims against the U.S.