I'm Elizabeth Lattery, and I'm Tiffany Bates, and welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's

happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our

favorite branch of government. This week, we're talking about some recent opinions and our new SCOTUS

book club, and Elizabeth chatted with Sixth Circuit

Judge Alice Batchelder. So there's still no word from the court about what is happening with the

postponed arguments from the March sitting or what will happen with the April sitting,

which is slated to begin on April 20th. But the justices have been keeping busy, and over the last two weeks,

they issued rulings in six cases. So we're going to run through some of those. So first up is

Allen versus Cooper. This was a unanimous opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan. A couple of the

justices wrote concurrences, but everybody joined, at least in the judgment of

the court. The court held that Congress lacked the authority to abrogate states' immunity

from copyright infringement lawsuits when it passed the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990.

So by way of background, federal courts may only hear suits against non-consenting

states if Congress unequivocally abrogated state sovereign immunity and had valid constitutional

authority to do so. So in this case, Frederick Allen, who is a photographer, sued the state of

North Carolina after it published

his copyrighted videos and photos of the recovery effort of Blackbeard's pirate ship,

the Queen Anne's Revenge, which was found off the coast of North Carolina about a decade ago.

The state moved to dismiss the suit on sovereign immunity grounds, and the district court

deny that motion, finding that the Congressional Act I mentioned before showed Congress's

clear intent to abrogate state sovereign immunity. The district court pointed to Section

5 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which authorizes Congress to enforce requirements of

...