Current Legal Events: The Supreme Court Starts a New Term

This is the first week in October, so the Supreme Court is back in session. Two cases of interest to us here at Chicago  Appleseed are an immigration case and a Fair Debt Collections Practice Act case. As always, SCOTUSblog offers an excellent primer on both cases.

The immigration case, Chaidez v. U.S., examines the intersection of guilty pleas, risk of deportation and effective assistance of counsel in a criminal trial. A 2009 case, Padilla v. Kentucky, found that counsel must inform a client when a guilty plea carries a risk of deportation, but left many questions unanswered (.pdf download), including the one raised in Chaidez: whether the ruling applies to cases which were final before Chaidez was decided.

The FDCPA case, Marx v. General Revenue Corp., looks at the question of when the defendant debt collection agency may be awarded its court costs. The FDCPA permits the court to award costs to the defendant debt collection agency for a lawsuit it has won when that suit was bought in bad faith and for the purpose of harassment. In Marx, the court will examine the interplay of the FDCPA and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to determine whether the defendant debt collector may collect its court costs.

The Court may still hear more cases. NPR’s Talk of the Nation runs through a couple, including a Voting Rights Act case.