In a column for MSNBC, Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito was called out by a legal scholar for his sloppy use of unvetted outside opinions to arrive at legal conclusions he's seeking that, in turn, have a wide-ranging impact on American life.
Using a bombshell report from Politico that Supreme Court justices are increasingly relying on the so-called "friend of the court" briefs known as amicus briefs in place of legal scholarship, University of Texas Law School Professor Steve Vladek warned it is an affront to how the nation's highest court is supposed to work.
With Politico reporting that conservative justices are being flooded with briefs from outside groups affiliated with well-financed conservative gadfly Leonard Leo, Vladek name-checked Alito as one of the justices who has been overusing the sketchy legal assertions found in the briefs in his legal rulings.
After first asserting, "... their arguments are showing up with growing regularity in the justices’ written opinions, notably in Justice Samuel Alito's majority decision overturning Roe v. Wade," Vladek wrote, "... the justices’ increasing reliance upon these briefs as authoritative sources for factual or legal contentions that haven’t been tested in the lower courts and are being advanced by groups or institutions with agendas of their own. Especially as the court has turned more sharply to the right in recent years, that reliance has likewise skewed toward claims advanced by parties with an obvious (and, as Politico suggests, coordinated) ideological bent, at the expense of not only the rules that are supposed to govern the legal process, but also the accuracy of the narratives the court’s opinions provide."
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Worse still, he added, the use of those briefs lacks guardrails that would expose who is financing them.
Writing, "the court’s disclosure rules for amicus rules are laughably weak. The brief need not disclose who funded a brief; it need disclose only that it wasn’t funded by one of the parties before the court," he added, "if the court is going to chastise lower courts for relying too heavily on amici, it should also look in the mirror."
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