Anonymous ID: d091bc May 12, 2020, 8:06 p.m. No.9149981   🗄️.is 🔗kun

guys, am I wrong, or would Ginsburg's opinion late last week apply in the Flynn case?

 

READ:

May 7, 2020

Ginsburg Rebukes 9th Circuit Panel for 'Radical Transformation' of Appeal

https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2020/05/07/ginsburg-rebukes-9th-circuit-panel-for-radical-transformation-of-appeal/?slreturn=20200412230231#

 

In an opinion Thursday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking for a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court, had unusually harsh criticism of a federal appellate panel for a practice that some court experts say the justices often embrace themselves.

 

Violation of the “party presentation” principle—central to Thursday’s ruling—is not often the basis for deciding a high court case. The principle refers to the long-standing feature of the court system that the parties involved in litigation, and not judges, are responsible for raising the legal issues a court must resolve.

 

That principle rarely appears in a Supreme Court decision, and the ruling was all the more remarkable that its author—Ginsburg—rebuked a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in accusatory terms that said the court’s “transformation” of a case went “well beyond the pale.”

 

Ginsburg’s opinion was in the case United States v. Sineneng-Smith.

 

“Instead of adjudicating the case presented by the parties, the appeals court named three amici and invited them to brief and argue issues framed by the panel, including a question Sineneng-Smith herself never raised earlier: ‘Whether the statute of conviction is overbroad … under the First Amendment,’” Ginsburg wrote.

 

Lawyers for the parties to the appeal were assigned a secondary role, Ginsburg said. The three amici appointed to brief and argue were the circuit’s Federal Defender Organizations (as a group), the Immigrant Defense Project, and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. The panel identified three issues for the briefing and gave amici 20 minutes to argue and 10 minutes to Sineneng-Smith’s counsel.