Case at a Glance

Bankruptcy cases generally culminate in a discharge, which bars efforts to collect the debtor's past debts. However, § 523(a) of the Bankruptcy Code excepts from discharge debts arising from the debtor's fraud or certain other wrongful conduct. Sometimes debtors file bankruptcy after promising to make payments in settlement of a lawsuit alleging such conduct. Are those promises themselves excepted from discharge upon proof of the underlying conduct, or does the settlement's release of the original claims preclude such proof and leave in their stead only a dischargeable promise to pay pursuant to the settlement?

• Previewed by John P. Hennigan, Jr., a professor of law at St. John's University School of Law in New York City.

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Case at a Glance

A motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 seeking collateral relief on behalf of a federal prisoner is subject to a statutory one-year "limitation period." That one-year period generally runs from the date on which the judgment of conviction becomes "final." The question presented is whether the conviction becomes final when the mandate of the court of appeals is issued, or instead when the time for filing a petition for a writ of certiorari expires.

• Previewed by Ian Heath Gershengorn, a partner with Jenner & Block, LLC in Washington, D.C.

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Case at a Glance

The False Claims Act provides that either the attorney general or any private person can sue any "person" who has filed a fraudulent claim with the federal government. In this case, the Supreme Court is asked to determine whether Cook County, Illinois, is such a "person" that can be sued for treble damages in a qui tam action (an enforcement action brought for both a private person and the United States) for allegedly fraudulently obtaining medical research funds.

• Previewed by Jay E. Grenig, a professor of law at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Case at a Glance

In a managed care system, HMO's can obtain global fee agreements or discounts in return for guaranteeing a volume of patients. Those cost-containment measures are threatened however, by the growing number of state laws that forbid insurers from discriminating against "any willing" health services provider who is located within the geographic coverage area of the health benefit plan. The question now before the Court is whether such state laws are preempted by ERISA or whether they are saved from preemption as laws "which regulate insurance."

• Previewed by Elliott B. Pollack, a member of the adjunct faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Law and co-chair of the Health Care Section in the Hartford office of the Connecticut law firm Pullman & Comley.

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Case at a Glance

In 1996, Congress amended immigration statutes to require that non-citizens who are deportable because they have been convicted of certain crimes be held in custody during the pendency of administrative proceedings to remove them from the United States. In this case, the Supreme Court will decide whether the mandatory detention of a "lawful permanent resident" during removal proceedings violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

• Previewed by Sherri Knuth, a legal affairs writer in St. Paul, Minn.

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Case at a Glance

While the Family and Medical Leave Act says it applies to State employers, the Eleventh Amendment provides that States may not be sued by private individuals in federal court. The Supreme Court has recognized, however, that in some circumstances the enforcement powers in Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment permit Congress to abrogate state sovereign immunity. Now the Court has agreed to review the Ninth Circuit's decision that Congress properly abrogated the states' sovereign immunity from damage claims based on violations of the FMLA.

• Previewed by Joshua A. Hawks-Ladds, an attorney with Pullman & Comley, LLC in Hartford, Conn.

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Case at a Glance

In 1987, Robert Frederick Garceau was sentenced to death. In 1995, he was appointed federal habeas corpus counsel and granted a stay of execution. Garceau's counsel filed a habeas corpus petition on July 2, 1996—after the effective date of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The Ninth Circuit nonetheless determined that the AEDPA was inapplicable to Garceau because his habeas petition had been "pending" on the date of the statute's enactment. The State now asks the Court to hold that the AEDPA applies to Garceau's case.

• Previewed by Kathy Swedlow, deputy director of the Innocence Project and an assistant professor at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan.

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Case at a Glance

Many residents of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, opposed a developer's proposed low-income housing development. The developer sued, asserting that city officials had improperly coordinated an effort to stop or delay the development. The city says the suit is an attack on direct democracy, the referendum process and the First Amendment. The developer counters that city officials tried to sabotage its housing project for illegal racial and familial status reasons.

• Previewed by David L. Hudson, an attorney with the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

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Case at a Glance

The Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act grants foreign states, including an "agency or instrumentality" of a foreign state, certain procedural protections including the right to remove a case from state court to federal court. In this case the Supreme Court addresses the question of whether a corporation a majority of which is indirectly, rather than directly, owned by a foreign state falls within the definition of "agency or instrumentality of a foreign state."

• Previewed by Brett G. Scharffs, an associate professor of law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

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Case at a Glance

Many working poor who do not receive group health benefits through their employers are unable to afford the increasingly high cost of prescription drugs. This case features a challenge to the State of Maine's broad effort to compel drug manufacturers to extend price rebates to this group. The question is whether the Maine law is preempted, not by ERISA, as is so frequently the issue in the health care litigation but, rather, by the supremacy and "dormant" commerce clauses of the United States Constitution.

• Previewed by Elliott B. Pollack, a member of the adjunct faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Law and co-chair of the Health Care Section in the Hartford office of the Connecticut law firm Pullman & Comley.

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