I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
A new study by Matthew L.M. Fletcher, a legal scholar at the Michigan State University College of Law, concludes that Indian tribes are almost universally denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court when they file for the Court to hear a case. The abstract of that study says:
The Supreme Court’s certiorari process is a barrier to justice for parties like Indian tribes and individual Indians. Statistically, there is a near zero chance the Supreme Court will grant a certiorari petition filed by tribal interests. At the same time, the Court grants certiorari in more than a quarter of petitions filed by the traditional opponents to tribal sovereignty, states. Why?
The Supreme Court has long maintained that the certiorari process is a neutral and objective means of eliminating patently frivolous petitions from consideration. This empirical study of preliminary memoranda drafted by the Supreme Court law clerk pool demonstrates the likelihood that the Court’s certiorari process is neither objective nor neutral. Cert pool clerks overstate the relative merits and importance of petitions filed by states against tribal interests, while understating the merits and importance of tribal petitions.
In this study of more than 162 certiorari petitions filed between 1986 and 1994, a majority of petitions brought by state and local governments received favorable treatment from the cert pool while recommending denial in all but a single tribal petition, often labeling them “factbound” and “splitless.” The impact of this weighted review of cert petitions is that a disproportionate number of state government petitions are granted while very few tribal petitions are granted.
When a party asks the Supreme Court to hear their appeal, they do so by filing a “petition for writ of certiorari,” often referred to simply as a cert petition. In a typical year, less than 2% of all cert petitions are granted. For the court to grant cert 35% of the time when a state or local government appeals a ruling involving disputes with Indian tribes, as this study reveals, is unusual to the point of astonishing.
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