William Baude: Does SCOTUS Have Jurisdiction to Directly Review Decisions of the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces?
Supreme Court jurisdiction over the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces
I have been very happily on paternity leave this quarter, and so I haven’t had much time to post about the many very interesting cases pending at the Supreme Court this term. But I wanted to briefly break in here to note the pending federal courts/national security cases of Dalmazzi/Cox/Ortiz v. United States. The cases concern the legality of appointments to the Guantanamo U.S. Court of Military Commission Review and are being very well litigated by a team led by Texas law professor Steve Vladeck.
For my purposes, what is especially interesting, though, is that the cases come to the Supreme Court from the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF), a so-called Article I Court that provides a second layer of appellate review over military sentences. The court has asked the parties to discuss CAAF’s jurisdiction, apparently interested in a technical argument made by the government that there is no appellate jurisdiction whenever the CAAF grants and then vacates a petition for review.
But I wanted to note that there is another, more basic jurisdictional question in the case, one that might nonetheless escape attention: Does the Supreme Court have jurisdiction to directly review decisions of the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces at all?
Read more at The Washington Post