Closing the courthouse doors

by Erwin Chemerinsky

Dean , School of Law

University of California - Irvine

Closing the courthouse doors: "Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions about very different statutes, one in a criminal context and the other civil, show that the conservative majority of the current Court is aggressively closing the courthouse doors even when it requires a tortured reading of federal statutes to do so."

Chemerinsky is referring tothe AT&T case - barring consumer class actions by enforcing AT&T mobile's arbitration clause; and a death penalty case - Cullen v. Pinholster in which the majority reads the habeas corpus act to bar factual hearings on exculpatory evidence not considered in  the state court proceeding. Justice Sotomayor's dissent is compelling, in my view. - GWC