U.S. Supreme Court

President Biden’s choice ended a monthlong search to replace Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who is retiring. Few Republicans are expected to back her nomination.

The Southern Poverty Law Center on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to reject a church’s request to reconsider longstanding precedent requiring public figures to prove “actual malice” in order to prevail on defamation claims. That nearly 60-year-old principle “occupies a foundational place in the constitutional firmament that has only become stronger with the passage of time,” the civil rights group argues.

The vacancy will give President Biden his first chance to name a new justice. He has promised to nominate a Black woman.

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a conservative think tank over Gov. Tony Evers’ decision to exclude the group’s writers from press briefings.

Prosecutors asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision that overturned Cosby’s sexual assault conviction. In a petition filed Monday, Nov. 29, they wrote that courts should not equate a supposed promise made by a former prosecutor to lifetime immunity.

At the Supreme Court, today’s lonely dissenting opinion sometimes grows into tomorrow’s constitutional law. So take note of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s 11-page dissent on the last day of the just-completed term, in which he argues that the court should have heard a challenge to its 1964 landmark holding in New York Times v. Sullivan.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed this week to consider whether a Texas city’s restrictions on digital billboards runs afoul of the First Amendment. Like most Texas cities, Austin only allows digital billboard ads on the advertisers’ premises. The city has said the regulations aim to preserve the local landscape, and further road safety by limiting distractions. Austin doesn’t impose similar restrictions on non-digital billboards.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a pair of bills Thursday that would dramatically expand video coverage of federal court trials and other proceedings while putting Supreme Court arguments on camera for the first time. Both bills have bipartisan support, including the endorsement of the panel’s chair, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), and the longstanding backing of the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

The high court agreed with a lower court’s determination that NCAA limits on the education-related benefits that colleges can offer athletes who play Division I basketball and football violate antitrust laws. The case is important in the short term for students who may see schools competing for talent by sweetening their offers with a variety of education-related benefits. It’s also important in the long term because it sets the stage for future challenges to NCAA rules limiting athletes’ compensation.

A comprehensive look at references to the press in justices’ opinions revealed “a marked and previously undocumented uptick in negative depictions.”

It said the case is moot. There were no noted dissents, but Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say the court at some point will need to examine the power of tech media companies.

Google can let out a huge sigh of relief now that the Supreme Court has saved the tech giant from billions of dollars in damages in a long-lasting lawsuit brought by Oracle over computer code used to build the Android operating system.  As for big movie studios, while a copyright dispute about computer code might not seem like a subject of particular consequence for them, an opinion from Justice Stephen Breyer concluding that Google made fair use of copyrighted material will very likely be discussed for quite some time and be invoked in other contexts. As such, a few lines in particular from today’s opinion could have many in Hollywood quite tense about a future staked on intellectual property.

The United States Supreme Court yesterday released its decision upholding the FCC’s 2017 changes to its ownership rules in the FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project case. The practical result of this decision is that the newspaper-broadcast crossownership prohibition will end. We certainly do not think that any future FCC would try to reinstate the crossownership ban given the current state of the newspaper industry. Also abolished in 2017 and now formally ended are the radio-television crossownership restrictions.

Few rules in the Code of Federal Regulations have as tortured a history as 47 CFR § 73.3555 — the broadcast multiple ownership rules. The subject of court decisions too numerous to count, a brief review of FCC decisions revising (or deciding not to revise) these rules reveals a twisted mass of logic and rationales where parties fiercely argue even as to the very reason for their existence. Today, the Supreme Court released a unanimous decision reversing the Third Circuit’s ruling involving three ownership rules, noting simply that the FCC’s approach had been reasonable, and the fact that it made its decision based on the record before it rather than the record the Third Circuit wished for, was just the way government must function.

In a big victory for broadcasters, the Supreme Court has reversed the Third Circuit’s decision throwing out the FCC’s broadcast deregulation under former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Current acting chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel had voted against the deregulatory move.

The NCAA says certain benefits could lead to a bidding war for players’ services, upending the collegiate model. Reformists say that’s the point.

On the final full day of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, his administration urged the Supreme Court to allow media ownership rules to change despite some who believe the move would hurt female and minority ownership of broadcast outlets. A high court with three Trump appointees could grant such wish, although the forthcoming decision figures to be prelude to more battles ahead.

C-SPAN will air/stream the Supreme Court oral argument today (Jan. 19) in FCC v. Prometheus. That is the FCC’s defense of its 2017 broadcast ownership deregulation decision. The argument is scheduled for 10 a.m.

Broadcasters are telling the Supreme Court that a lower court’s rejection of the FCC’s broadcast dereg decision was a recipe for “judicial intervention run riot” and that diversity alone cannot be invoked to block deregulation of rules that marketplace changes have rendered unsupportable and no longer necessary in the public interest.

Turns out Jan. 19 will be an inauguration day of sorts — inaugurating the Supreme Court’s first consideration of an appeal of the FCC’s media ownership rule deregulation. It will be the fourth oral argument of the January session, with one hour of argument scheduled, though that could spill over depending on how the arguments and Justices’ questioning goes.

Gray’s brief argues that the FCC’s modernized rules should finally be allowed to take effect because the agency issued them in full compliance with its obligations under Section 202(h) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

The FCC has weighed in with the Supreme Court in defense of its order deregulating local broadcast ownership and in opposition to a lower court’s invalidation of that order. The crux of the FCC’s argument is that the lower court repeatedly prevented the commission from repealing or modifying rules it had concluded were no longer in the public interest.

The U.S. Supreme Court won’t review an antitrust case that could have outsized influence on the future of the television industry. On Monday, the high court announced it wouldn’t be hearing National Football League v. Ninth Inning, a lawsuit against the professional football league that challenges how teams currently pool telecast rights and collectively negotiate a licensing package for out-of-market games. The antitrust dispute could shake up live sports broadcasting.

Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s choice to fill the vacancy of the late liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, potentially opens a new era of rulings on abortion, the Affordable Care Act and even his own election. Democrats were unable to stop the outcome, Trump’s third justice on the court, as Republicans race to reshape the judiciary.

President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said on Wednesday she was open to at least one sweeping change for the nation’s top judicial body — allowing cameras into the chamber for the first time in its 230-year history.

Broadcasters would welcome reformation of the outdated newspaper-TV crossownership rule, but the Supreme Court’s decision to hear an appeal of the Third Circuit decision doesn’t solve all the industry’s COVID-induced woes. The FCC still needs to eliminate the Top 4 rule and online video distributors need to be classified as MVPDs.

As we reported last week, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear appeals by the FCC and the NAB of a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that overturned a 2017 decision by the FCC attempting to relax its media ownership rules. So, what does this actually mean for the FCC’s ownership rules and the broadcast industry? Not surprisingly based on the history of this proceeding, the answer is not entirely clear.

The country’s top court has taken up a major case about media ownership rules that will have a far-reaching impact on M&A and broadcast regulation.

The case before the justices Wednesday has to do with Google’s creation of the Android operating system now used on the vast majority of smartphones worldwide. Google says that to create Android, which was released in 2007, it wrote millions of lines of new computer code. But it also used 11,330 lines of code and an organization that’s part of Oracle’s Java platform.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the FCC/broadcaster appeal of the Third Circuit’s most recent smackdown of the FCC’s broadcast dereg efforts drew a crowd Friday (Oct. 2). That may be because the FCC for almost two decades has been responding to remands from the Circuit as the commission under Republican chairmen tried to eliminate the newspaper-broadcast crossownership rule and other local station ownership restrictions but this is the first time the Supremes will get involved.

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Friday it will take up a long-running legal dispute over whether the FCC can loosen U.S. media ownership rules. A lower court has thwarted the FCC’s efforts to revise the rules since 2003 in a series of decisions.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights. Her death Friday from complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, just over six weeks before Election Day, is likely to set off a heated battle over whether President Donald Trump should nominate, and the Republican-led Senate should confirm, her replacement, or if the seat should remain vacant until the outcome of his race against Democrat Joe Biden is known.

Comcast Corp. says the U.S. Supreme Court should step in and shut down a monopolization lawsuit over the TV ad placement market, arguing a federal appeals court improperly gave a green light to claims it illegally refused to do business with rival Viamedia Inc.

The administration said in a high-court filing Thursday that Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account with more than 85 million followers is his personal property and blocking people from it is akin to elected officials who refuse to allow their opponents’ yard signs on their front lawns.

Fix the Court, the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Society of Professional Journalists have joined with more than two dozen groups to ask Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to continue to provide live audio of its oral arguments.

The grim coronavirus pandemic has brought one welcome change that the Supreme Court should make permanent: Oral arguments, conducted for the moment via teleconference, have been broadcast live, bringing Americans closer than ever to a key organ of their government.

“The FCC’s anachronistic ownership rules place local broadcasters at a decided disadvantage against other competitors in the complex, fast-evolving, highly competitive video marketplace,” the Big 4 affiliate groups told the Supreme Court.

Gray Television has filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court backing the FCC’s appeal of a federal court’s smackdown of its broadcast deregulation decision. Gray told the court it was imperative that it hear the FCC appeal, reverse the Third Circuit, and allow the FCC’s “media modernization” to proceed.