On Monday, the Supreme Court will file its opinion in Robinson v. Lewis. (Briefs here; oral argument video here.) It will be the first opinion in a late-May calendar case and comes even as three undecided early-May cases remain in the court’s summer pipeline.
Robinson is on referral from the Ninth Circuit and the federal appellate court has been waiting a really long time for an answer to the state law question it asked.
As restated by the Supreme Court, the question is: “When a California court denies a claim in a petition for writ of habeas corpus, and the petitioner subsequently files the same or a similar claim in a petition for writ of habeas corpus directed to the original jurisdiction of a higher court, what is the significance, if any, of the period of time between the earlier petition’s denial and the subsequent petition’s filing (66 days in this case) for the purpose of determining the subsequent claim’s timeliness under California law?” The court accepted the case from the Ninth Circuit in December 2015.
The opinion can be viewed Monday starting at 10:00 a.m.