Thankfully, we don`t have to dive into these tricky waters here, but we just need to address the more mundane (but perhaps no less interesting) question of how to quote the judge`s statement. There are two issues that need to be addressed, and we will address them in turn. First, how to properly cite a recent Supreme Court opinion and, second, how to indicate that the cited document corresponds to or denies the refusal of the certificate. As legal citation experts have noted, there are many problems with this citation format, but it is the one we have that is widely used in court systems across the country. However, it can take between four and five years before a page number is assigned. Therefore, a short quotation with footnotes, which is governed by Rule 10.9(a)(iii), would probably also require a reference to the page number of the notice. In fact, courts and law journals cite this type of document, so a reference to Thomas J.`s quoted testimony from the second page of the Slip opinion would be briefly quoted in a footnote under the title McKee, 586 U.S. at ____ (Slip op. cit. to 2).

Rules 10.8 and 10.9 of the Bluebook provide us with a starting point for the first question. Rule 10.8.1(b) refers to cases available only as sheet notices, but the case in question has been referred to as a volume in the US reports. Therefore, it will be the somewhat cumbersome McKee v. quote. Cosby, 586 U.S. ____ (2019), in which the space created with four underscores represents a page number that has not yet been assigned. (Interestingly, Westlaw represents spaces with hyphens, while Lexis uses underscores.) Rule 10.6(a) of the Blue Book guides us to the second question of how to create the right parenthesis that determines the weight of authority. In the absence of an abbreviation listed in Table T8, it is necessary to look for examples of how these documents were cited.

For a recent citation on a simultaneous refusal of the certificate, see, for example, Moore v. Texas, 586 U.S. ____, ____ (2019) (cited as Salazar-Limon v. Houston, 581 U.S. ____,____, 137 S.Ct. 1277, 1278, 197 L.Ed.2d 751 (2017) (Alito, J., agreeing with denial of certiorari)). For a recent quotation on a dissent from the refusal of the certificate, see, for example, Zagorski v. Parker, 586 USA, ____, ____ (Mem.) (2018) (cited as Arthur v. Dunn, 580 U.S. ______, ____, 137 pp. 725, 725, 197 L.Ed.2d 225 (2017) (Sotomayor, J., different from the refusal of certiorari)). Most reference librarians you`ll meet will offer the same advice in this situation: look for an example of how this type of source has been cited in the past and use your judgment to determine if this style of citation fits the gap between one or more of the Blue Book`s established rules.

A colleague aptly described the situation in a blog post a few years ago, calling this ever-changing mix of rules and precedents Bluebook Common Law. The citation comes from a coincidence with the rejection of an application for certiorari to the Supreme Court. Consents and deviations from certificate refusals, as they are colloquially known, are statements that support or reject the court`s decision not to hear a case. These orders form what court observers have called the court`s “shadow protocol” and on which some empirical studies have begun. For the complete uninitiated, see the following article by Tom Goldstein, editor-in-chief and co-founder of SCOTUSBlog: What You Can Learn from Opinions on Rejecting Certiorari. (Goldstein will be the keynote speaker at Carolina Law`s 2019 Annual Murphy Lecture on Wednesday, March 20 at 12:00 p.m.) The case denied to the certificate was No. 17-1542, McKee v. Cosby, on appeal to the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in which the question asked was whether Kathrine McKee, a woman who accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, had become a public figure in a defamation case. Judge Thomas agreed that the court had acted correctly in denying the certificate for the case, but then wrote the lines quoted above, leading legal commentators to speculate about the judge`s First Amendment jurisprudence. A recent example of interest emerged last week, on February 19, 2019, when Justice Thomas wrote: [New York Times Co. v.

Sullivan, 376 U. p. 254 (1964)] and the court decisions that prolonged it were politically motivated decisions disguised as constitutional law. Instead of simply applying the First Amendment as understood by those who ratified it, the court designed its own “federal rules” by balancing the “competing values at stake in defamation suits.” Gertz, op. cit. cit., pp. 334, 348 (cited in the New York Times, op. cit., p. 279).

So, let`s put it all together. For Thomas J.`s observations on defamation, see McKee v. Cosby, 586 U.S. _____, ____ (2019) (Thomas, J., agrees with the rejection of certiorari). We should not continue to reflexively apply this political approach to the Constitution. Instead, we should carefully consider the original meaning of the first and fourteenth amendments. If the Constitution does not require public figures to meet a real standard of malice in defamation suits, then neither should we.