SCOTUS ended this term with aplomb, and with a bomb, the long-awaited ruling on student debt relief. The decision, which struck the Biden administration's debt relief program, came about, in formal terms, as an interpretation of the Higher Education Relief Opportunities Act. Some in the US maintain that it would be both right and urgent to make college free in the United States. Forgive all college-generated debt, and nationalize the financing of college that will make lending for such purposes hereafter a non-issue. The Biden administrations plans fall very very short of that. To Biden this is a one-shot debt forgiveness, rather narrowly targeted. Only $20,000 of debt forgiveness for 30 million people. The idea is to give those people a one-time break, given the general impression that the lending has gotten out of control and the borrowers are suffering too great a burden. Also, this one-shot move can be justified as a post-Covid stimulus, akin to the checks that Presiden...
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Another term of the US Supreme Court has come and gone. Of course it hasn't really ended for you, my devoted readers, until you've had a chance to see what Christopher Faille thinks of it. So here we are. There are many decisions this term that involve very important and topical matters that won't be discussed here or that (as in the case of state taxation of online sales) will only be glancingly mentioned. When that happens, it may be for no reason better than that they have been much covered and I have nothing in particular to add about them. I was tempted, when I first started outlining this material, to spend a fair amount of space on LAGOS v. US, an interpretation of the criminal restitution statute, that is, a statute aimed at getting the guilty to pay for the costs of enforcing the law against them. But I have overcome that temptation. Here, instead, is a very summary statement. In a unanimous opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer the Court adopted a narrow view o...